LL Cool J rocketed to the top of the hip-hop world in 1985 with Radio, his astonishing debut, but he lost his footing a bit with
Bigger and Deffer, his mildly disappointing follow-up that proved to be a commercial breakthrough all the same. It's a powerful album that gets underway with a bang, as
LL raps, "No rapper can rap quite like I can," and makes his case throughout the album-opening "I'm Bad," a ferocious hardcore rap with a great DJ-scratched hook. While that song ranks among
LL's best (and most popular) ever,
Bigger and Deffer doesn't boast too many other standout moments, with the exception of "I Need Love." Its balladic tenderness comes as a late-album surprise, considering how ferocious
LL sounds elsewhere here. Nonetheless, like it or loathe it, the song set the template for a number of such lovers raps that would bring
LL much crossover success in the years to come. "I Need Love" aside,
Bigger and Deffer is consistently solid, produced entirely by the L.A. Posse (Darryl Pierce, Dwayne Simon, and
Bobby Erving) and filled with the sort of hard-hitting hip-hop that was Def Jam's staple at the time. But while the album is mostly solid, it does lack the creative spark that had made Radio such an invigorating release only a couple years prior (the absence of
Rick Rubin here is unfortunate). In those couple years since
LL had put out Radio, rap music had taken big strides. Now, in 1987,
LL had to contend with the likes of
Eric B. & Rakim,
Kool Moe Dee,
Public Enemy, and
Boogie Down Productions, with others like
EPMD,
Big Daddy Kane,
Ice-T, and
N.W.A on the horizon. When put in such a context,
Bigger and Deffer pales a bit; in the years since
LL's Radio rocked the streets of New York, rap had taken leaps and bounds while
LL hadn't. So it was no surprise when
LL suddenly came under attack by his rivals and a few fans, sending him back to the drawing board for his next effort, the whopping 18-track
Walking with a Panther (1989). ~ Jason Birchmeier