Junior M.A.F.I.A. — Conspiracy

Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace attempts to lift his childhood friends out of poverty by taking them into the music industry, hoping they will follow his success. The supergroup of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Junior M.A.F.I.A., is born, acronym for "Junior Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes", a sort of union of intentions between adolescent boys, the oldest is the same Notorious BIG, who's just over twenty years old. It's made up of the groups The 6s (James "Lil' Cease" Lloyd, Chico and Nino Brown; rappers Bugsy and Capone aren't included in the Junior MAFIA) and The Snakes (Antoine "Larceny" Spain and Rashaun "Trife" Spain), and by solo artists Terrence "Klepto" Harding, Cheek Del Vec, and Kimberly "Lil' Kim" Jones aka The Big Momma, the only female artist of the group and who has the role of "lieutenant" in function of the "godfather" Biggie Smalls.

The production is credited to Lance "Un" Rivera (all skits), The Notorious BIG, DJ Clark Kent, Akshun, EZ Elpee, Daddy-O, Undestanding and Special Ed. Guests are Jamal, Faith Evans and Jimmy Cozier. The album should follow in the footsteps of that of Notorious BIG in the intentions of the authors, finding numerous difficulties from the first moments, due to the fact that the boys all play as separate acts. The lyrics find their foundation in a materialistic gangster trinity made up of money, women and crime, with few other ideas: there would be "Crazaay" for example, where Larceny and Trife come up with bars on the effects of alcohol and drugs, but nobody cares. In addition to that, it must be remembered that these kids aren't rappers, they're guys from the street, the closest thing to a rapper other than Biggie is Lil Kim. Trife and Larceny have their own tracks, Kim and Cease have others, Klepto is the only one to have a solo song ("Lyrical Wizardy") and the rest is a little here and there as Biggie obscures all the four times that is present. The closest things to posse tracks are "I Need You Tonight" with Trife, Kim and Klepto along with guest Faith Evans (later replaced by Aaliyah to sing the hook in the single's video clip) and "Murder Onze", with Cheek Del Vec, Klepto, Trife and Larceny.

Looking beyond the skills of the performers, the music isn't good, the rhythms sound cheap and poor, the drum falls badly in these fifty minutes and the selection of samples should be reviewed, because when there's no ballad ("I Need You Tonight", "Back Stabbers") or Biggie to save the day, coming with more energy and inspiration than you might expect from him on an album like this, the songs weigh down. Take for example "White Chalk": the sound of the hospital machine and that of the heavy drum annihilate the sample, which in theory is excellent and comes from Mike Oldfield. "Realms of Junior MAFIA", despite some of the best performers throughout the LP, is tainted with one of the ugliest uses I've ever heard of the ESG "UFO" sample.

The album is released by Undeas and Big Beat, a subsidiary of Atlantic, and at the expense of a remarkable commercial result — enters the top 10 among pop records and is second in the rap chart, gold in a few months — is snubbed by critics, few years before the group's disbandment in the aftermath of Notorious BIG's death. Taken as a whole, it's not essential listening, this is self-evident, yet denying its heavy legacy is difficult: the record helps launch the solo careers of Lil' Kim and Lil' Cease, there's Biggie's biggest contribution as a guest, and three singles are released. "Player's Anthem", starring Lil' Cease, Lil' Kim and BIG, "I Need You Tonight", which features both Lil' Kim and Faith Evans, and six months after the album's release, in February 1996, "Get Money". These three singles are sequenced consecutively in the first part of the LP, the most relevant being the last, "Get Money".

This track soon becomes a hit and the spearhead of the album, it reaches the first place among the rap singles ("Player's Anthem" had reached #2) and is platinum in the summer. What Biggie accomplishes here is beyond the ordinary and the possible and even beyond the impossible. The track is crystal clear dissing against his wife, Faith Evans, who just stopped singing the chorus on the previous track, "I Need You Tonight", eight-ten seconds earlier. EZ Elpee's work is something sensational, he takes the sample of Sylvia Striplin's "You Can't Turn Me Away", which musically doesn't sound good, but somehow makes it work for five minutes, the downtempo drum is muddy and there's an excellent bass to hold up the track. Lil' Kim executes a simple chorus destined to go down in history, then Biggie delivers an extra-verse. Kim, Biggie's amante — the translation sounds less elegant than the word itself should be —, arrives and gives a deep stab to the track, with a dissing that is directed to Biggie Smalls himself, delivering bars with a velvety and energetic flow, fantastic. It's not over, there's the music video for the single: Biggie asks for Faith Evans to play herself, but the girl refuses and BIG manages to convince Charlie Baltimore, his other amante, to play the role of his wife, putting therefore two of his amanti in the dissing against his wife. "Call me evil, or unbelievable". 6/10.