By Odeisel

Hip-Hop is preoccupied by death.  An art form that began celebrating life and partying has become tethered to darkness. Whether that is coincidence or by design, I will leave to you to decide but let’s take a look at that why. Americans from the sixties can all remember what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. They do remember what they were doing with pretty much any of those tragic murders from King to Malcolm etc. I do remember when B.I.G. was killed.

I was in college then, and March 8 was another drunken party night. There was actually a fight at the party that I managed to only watch as spectator. After a bit of parking lot pimpin’ it was a relatively early night and I was in bed by one. I got an off campus call (double ring, non booty) at 2AM.  And someone from home said Biggie got shot. I wiped the cold out my eyes and after a groggy what are you talking about, it sunk in. I didn’t feel that way when Tupac got shot, because you figured he’d get better, and come back with more records popping shit. This didn’t feel good from the beginning.

There were a lot of us back then that wondered what the hell he was doing out there anyway. We knew that there was certainly a climate that was conducive to violence and that after Tupac died there was an element out there that believed Bad Boy responsible on some level. When I got the news it just hit like a bomb; like it was family. I guess perhaps THAT was the true genius of Christopher Wallace.

In death, heroes are magnified to mythic proportions. Deified even. We forgive transgressions. We ignore faults. Like the ultimate breakup, we remember the good times with little attention to the reason why we broke up. Biggie was flawed. There is no drama in perfection; no heroism with invulnerability. Fat. Black. Husky, nasal voice. Lazy eye. And every reason in the world to be relegated to the underbelly of society. But there was a defiance. A refusal to avoid the shine. A reversal of fortune by seeming force of will. Yes black and ugly as ever, HOWEVER. I think more than a few people lived vicariously through Christopher Wallace. More than a few people were paralyzed by their shortcomings and frozen in place.

 Biggie was able to extol the virtue of the ruling class, complete with Bentleys, and Coogi, and Versace and a bunch of shit regular people can’t afford, yet he never drifted in earthy sensibility past the borders of Brownsville. That tightrope walk was a miraculous demonstration of Wallace’s narrative dexterity. He never let the boulevard resent the bourgeoisie in him.

In his death his elevation diminishes what he was, because to me it’s almost an indictment that his accomplishments weren’t enough. He didn’t “bring the East Coast back” as 36 Chambers, Illmatic, and a bunch of records stylistically ushered in that era beforehand. Bad Boy may have mugged more cameras due to Mr. Combs’ omnipresence, but they never outsold Death Row on an album to album basis. No matter how much we love him, nobody is the greatest rapper of all time with only 2 albums. (It’s funny that of all the shit Canibus said on the mic that phrase is the most repeated/remembered).

The real truth is that Christopher Wallace was perhaps the most superhumanly human of any rapper that ever existed. Tupac was a handsome physical specimen with otherworldly energy and charisma, and a whirlwind of drama made for media. ODB was so human it was a tragic caricature/parody of a sick yet entertaining family member. Jay-Z does not allow that emotional resonance.  You “gotta admire him from four fiends away.” There are tons of everyman “regular” rappers. Biggie, however could speak about things so far from the existence of most of his fans, yet relate them with such commonality that it was nothing.

When you think of Biggie today, you don’t have to convince yourself or anyone else that he was the greatest rapper of all time. He was someone’s son.  Someone’s father. Someone’s friend and someone’s lover. That’s enough to be missed. But behind that microphone, he was a communicator who took the world serious enough to want more from it, but not serious enough to ignore the glass menagerie of it all. “Niggas is actors, niggas deserve Oscars, me I’m critically acclaimed…” That line tells you all you need to know about the Notorious B.I.G. A tongue in cheek narrator keenly aware of his own depressed reality able to live vicariously through the images he could conjure in the minds of his listeners. The ability to change his own reality with words. There is perhaps no greater epitaph.

If you love B.I.G. you NEED this in your life http://www.jperiod.com/march909/ >J.period, who has become a best of genius has really and truly outdone himself with this collection. No gratuitous yelling and screaming his name, but masterful blends/remixes of Biggie’s catalog the hard and the pop. Much love and respect to him for this.  Enjoy. 

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