For those in the game, hip hop is a serious business. Sometimes it's a matter of life or death; take Christopher George Latore Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls or The Notorious B.I.G.), a Brooklyn rapper killed aged 24 in March of this year in a drive by shooting that was apparently part of a long running East Coast/West Coast beef. Conspiracy theories linking this crime to the murder of Tupac Shakur some months earlier abound, but suffice it to say here that 'I'll Be Missing You' is a tribute to Wallace from fellow East Coast rapper Puff Daddy and Wallace's own widow, the self styled first lady of rap Faith Evans.
For the most part, 'I'll Be Missing You' is based around a sample of Andy Summer's guitar riff from The Police's 'Every Breath You Take' and it spins Sting's stalker anthem into a personal statement of loss. "Every step I take, every move I make, Every single day, every time I pray, I'll be missing you". It's a neat idea, but it's an obvious one too, a one horse town concept that's fine in passing but not big or clever enough to shoulder the whole song by itself. Not only that, being such an obvious sample, 'I'll Be Missing You' never breaks free of its source to find its own voice; in any case, it couldn't if it tried.
Which is another one of its problems - 'I'll Be Missing You' doesn't try. Not all that hard anyway. That sample is constant and though Evans' vocal is suitably fraught, Puff Daddy's linking rap is a pedestrian mumble of loss based platitudes personalised so directly at its subject as to deny it any emotional crossover to the non rap fan or casual listener who wouldn't know Biggie Smalls from the hole in the ground he was buried in. Yes, it's heartfelt and it's genuine - I can't deny that, but from that tasteless bling of the cover in, it's a one dimensional tribute which, whilst it does have resonance within that dimension, makes the bottom line one of this being too insular and self serving to be regarded as a good single.
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