In the school where I work, there’s a fifth grader who wears a Notorious B.I.G. jacket. There are a few staff who covet it. Though I don’t say anything, I’m one of them. The boy is 11. Biggie Smalls died 13 years ago, today. He doesn’t know anything about Biggie. Couldn’t name an album or even a track, couldn’t give me any 16 bars, let alone 16 Bars. I want to talk about it with him, to school him on Biggie, to get on his level in a way I can’t with their hip-hop idols. God knows we have so little in common, I should jump on that, make a connection with him, show him I was in this game before he was born. But I don’t.
I’m not sure why, but I have a feeling it goes down to the same reasons my mother hated hearing Biggie’s lyrics punching through the floorboards when I was 14. All the guns, all the sex (and sexism), all the drugs. Our school doesn’t pretend those pressures and those desires don’t exist, but school isn’t the place for them to be encouraged. Nonetheless, if I say, “I used to hear Biggie freestyle on Hot 97 back before Ready to Die. I used to say Gimme That Loot whenever I got a card from Nana or my weekly allowance. I was crushed when he got shot,” then … well, am I saying that the messages and themes of his tracks are okay? Because it wasn’t the glorification of violence, the objectification of women, the free-spending, the casual sex, that made me love Biggie. Sure, they were a good hook to make me listen, but I could’ve gotten that anywhere in 94. No. Biggie was an artist, a man who looked at his world and painted a picture clear enough for me to understand.
Excuse me, flows just grow through me
Like trees to branches
Cliffs to avalanches
It’s the praying mantis – The What
It was the lyricism, the grasp of his own voice and his own art, and his confidence in both, that drew me to Biggie. Those lyrics up there, and probably 50 others, were etched into my notebooks. I knew I had no flow, no cadence, no rhythm, no chance. But I didn\’t want one, either. I didn\’t grow up wanting to be Biggie, I grew up wanting to be my own person. He represented that to me. A fat guy with a voice that shouldn\’t have gotten him in the door, selling albums and drawing crowds, just telling his own story. Sure, it helped that it was lurid, and — it turns out — largely fictional, but his confidence and his overwhelming talent are what got him in the door. His ability to craft a narrative both real enough to appeal to his friends and cohort, but also compelling enough lyrically to appeal to me. It wasn\’t just the truth, but a beautiful version of it, ugly though it might have been. And that\’s art, in a nutshell.
Biggie didn’t make hip-hop into art, but he might have done so for me. If it weren’t for Biggie, I might not have gotten into Wu Tang and Guru, and later, the Roots, Mos Def, Aesop Rock, Deltron, Prince Paul. In Biggie, I recognized the real and acknowledged the embellishment, but embraced the art that inhabits the successful confluence of the two.
My memories of Biggie are tainted by the angst of adolescence, straining against the yoke of seemingly oppressive adults. I suppose he played the role in my life that my father thought Jack Kerouac was supposed to, but 16 years after I first heard Ready to Die, I played it on loop all day without irony and I can\’t even look at my dog-eared copy of On the Road without chuckling at my naivete and shaking my head.
Maybe I will talk with that boy about Biggie tomorrow. And maybe we\’ll talk about art, what hip-hop means, what growing up means, what admitting who and what you are means, what finding out what you love is. Or maybe I’ll just say: “And if you don’t know, now you know.”
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