More thug life

B.I.G.'s letter from a ghost

by Franklin Soults

The day after the drive-by killing of the Notorious B.I.G. (nickname, Biggie Smalls; real name, Christopher G. Wallace), I overheard some young checkout girls at my local CVS speculating on the murder. "I already know who did it," one African-American cashier muttered to herself.

"Who?" I asked, and she studied me briefly. "It was Tupac," she finally answered with quiet, don't-you-get-it aplomb. "He ain't dead."

I already knew about the popular theory among black youth that rapper Tupac Shakur, himself the victim of a drive-by six months earlier, had in fact staged his own death to escape "the game." Now, it seems, the West Coast superstar also did it to plot his revenge for a 1994 robbery and shooting for which he held his East Coast rival responsible.

In the big picture, this may just be an extreme example of the pernicious racial divide brought into ugly focus by the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials, a divide that has engendered so much distrust in this country, it seems to taint everyone's perception of reality no matter how blatant the "facts." I think it also shows how the myth of the invincible outlaw has overwhelmed hardcore rap at a time when the music has become so insular that it has little else to fuel its fire. By rubbing against hardcore's guiding dictum to "keep it real," the myth ignites the genre's cold and morbid fatalism into a gothic, almost surreal melodrama: "reality" dictates that the gangsta faces certain death, yet the gangsta can never die. Hence the title of the Notorious B.I.G.'s long-awaited double album, Life After Death (Bad Boy), and hence the devastating irony of its release on March 25, little more than two weeks after real life turned the title's intended meaning inside out.

Before Biggie's murder, the fervent hope in the hip-hop community was that he could somehow overcome all of gangsta rap's internal contradictions, crushing them with his own massive weight, both physical and metaphorical. Certainly he had the style to go with his 6-foot-3, 280-pound frame. His thick-tongued swagger was reminiscent of the unlikely grace of EPMD, the first rap crew to make cloddish delivery sound cool, only Biggie was a way better wordslinger. With truly unique flair, his raps audaciously slapped rhymes all over a single line, twisting words to fit the pattern at his whim ("Birthdays was the worst days/Now we sip champagne when we thirstday"). On his 1994 debut album, Ready To Die (Bad Boy), that style was giddy enough to warm up a straight hardcore jam like "The What" yet imperious enough to make him sound like a natural-born gangsta don even when he was getting busy with the ladies on a smooth crossover hit like "Big Poppa." For many rap fans, it represented both gangsta's apotheosis and its evanescent moment of transcendence.

Life After Death was supposed to be the carnal manifestation of that transcendence. Almost two hours long, with 24 songs split evenly between its two CDs, the album features guest appearances by everyone from salacious R&B crooner R. Kelly to dark and twisted hip-hop producer RZA. On the album's best cuts, there's no doubt that Biggie's style was still in full effect. The single "Hypnotize" is a pyrotechnic boast that careers all over the rhyme dictionary ("Eat escargot/My car go/One six-tee/Real swift-lee"). "I Got a Story To Tell" lays out a sex-and-robbery rap with more sly panache than I've heard from any gangsta in years.

Yet that isn't enough to pull it off. Part of the problem is the mundane limitations of craft. Unlike Tupac and the other Death Row rappers influenced by Dr. Dre's golden "pimp shit," Biggie never had a groundbreaking producer at Bad Boy. In 1994, all he needed was some standard funk and disco-derived beats to make his mark, but on Life After Death, he and label owner/executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs try to absorb every style out there, and from the doomy, West Coast synths of "Last Day" to the retrograde electrofunk of "Nasty Boy," the effect is ersatz. Furthermore, Biggie just isn't big enough to cover all the bases. Trying to make his gangbanging boasts harder than ever on one cut, then pretending he's above the game the next, dissing the bitches here while playing up the pussy there, he finds his raps running thin halfway through each disc, till on some cuts he sounds almost like a guest on his own album.

Then, of course, his murder has left bloodstains all over the album, deeply altering some of its best cuts. "If I go/You gots to go," he threatens on one number. "Niggas bleed just like me," goes another. Finally, on the masterful RZA-produced closer, he slowly moans, "You're no-body/Till Some-body/(pause)/Kills you." All his boasts have turned to epitaphs. For what it's worth, the meaning of that is as clear as black and white.