4 July 1997
I recall reports of his death in 1997, but I don’t recall the Notorious B.I.G. being as much a star name here in Ireland as he clearly was in the US. If my own mid-’90s circle is indicative, we were more into the Wu-Tang Clan, but that’s as much a narrow awareness of US rap and hip hop on our part. So, by analogy with the shock I felt at Jeff Buckley’s death that same summer, we should take the sincerity of all involved with this record as a given, and assume a similar ache of feeling among some of its buying public.
That said, I doubt ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ went to number one in Ireland purely on depth of grief over Biggie. At a surface level as a record, it’s bland enough to appeal to a wide audience, plus its familiar classic rock interpolation (which gives Sting 100% of the royalties for ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, after successfully suing when ‘Every Breath You Take’ was used here without prior permission) also opened mainstream ears and minds to it. Puff Daddy is not a distinctive or engaging rapper, and hearing Faith Evans here doesn’t pique my curiosity to hear Faith Evans elsewhere. The appearance near the end of vocal group 112, hereby going to the top of the alphabetical listing of acts that got to number one in Ireland, has a bit more spark and appeal, if not enough to offset that overall blandness and the inherent sentimentality of an in memoriam tribute record. We’ll soon have the dubious benefit of a like-for-like comparison with another record of this kind, one that makes ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ seem like a study in stoicism.
