Heavy D. walked a thin line back in the day, achieving significant success on the pop charts without alienating the hiphoppers. He did this on the strength of craftsmanship & personality. It hasn't been cool for a long time to like Heavy D.'s style of music (except at age 14 I asked for & received this CD for Christmas 1999 because I was a weird kid), but nobody can deny his absolute mastery on the microphone. Enunciation, rhythm, breath control, flow were all impeccable, & he had the stage show to match it.
Big Tyme was his commercial breakthrough, propelled by the singles "Somebody for Me" & "We Got Our Own Thang," which opens the album with an uptempo new jack swing production by Teddy Riley (his only beat on the album). It has a more glossy, radio-ready sound than the beats by Hev's DJ Eddie F., who produces most of the rest of the album with a comparatively rugged, sample-based boom-bap sound. Eddie does have some pop tricks up his sleeve though; "Somebody for Me" is just as polished but the drums hit harder.
Outside the well-known singles, we have songs like "A Better Land," the (for the time period) obligatory conscious song that opens with an MLK speech sample. The social commentary is light--basic come-together rhetoric--but Hev sells it with his genial, good-times personality. The overall feeling of the album is cozy, warm & welcoming, in an early De La Soul way, which makes it all the more jarring to hear Hev drop a big homophobic f-slur a few songs later in "More Bounce," his one attempt to sound tough on the album.
My favorite song on the record actually might not be a rap song--the overweight lover switches it up on us & drops "Mood for Love," a mellow dancehall reggae song with a more hiphop drum pattern. The Jamaican-born emcee sounds completely convincing singing in patois, & it points toward the more pure reggae-oriented stuff he did near the end of his career/life.
Big Tyme isn't my favorite Heavy D. album (I prefer the slightly rougher stuff he did later) but it's an important document of a still-underappreciated talent. Rest in peace Dwight Arrington/Heavy D., 1967-2011.
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