Notorious B.I.G Death Day
On this Biggie death day, many other places can give you better and more fitting retrospectives, BET is running an evening of programming and this month’s ‘XXL’ and ‘The Source’ have commemorative articles, but if you’ve already digested his music, I think the best place to go is Cheo Hodari Coker’s ‘Unbelievable; The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G’. This book does not seem to get enough credit for being a legitimately excellent and intelligent biography. As far as I know, it’s the only Biggie bio so maybe there’s nothing to compare it to or maybe it’s because it’s published by ‘Vibe’ and is big and glossy and therefore taken less seriously. Either way, this is all unfortunate because Coker’s biography provides not only a factual account of Christopher Wallace’s life but makes his death nearly palpable.
I recall sitting in a grocery store parking lot, in the rain, in Dover, DE, waiting for my girlfriend to get off of work, finishing the book and just feeling kind of empty. I had never thought too much about Biggie’s death because I was only 11 when it happened and all I knew of Biggie were his cool videos and my 20 year-old uncle listening to a ‘Hypnotize’ cassette single every time I drove around with him. It was only years after his death that I began to appreciate the music, so Biggie’s death was “a given”. It didn’t feel that different from getting into music from the 60s or 70s where you know there’s only a limited discography to delve into. Paradoxically, it was Biggie’s acknowledgment of death and self-destruction that affected me but somehow, the full emotions of the events didn’t connect to the actual death of the creator of those words until reading ‘Unbelievable’. I knew the “East Coast/West Coast feud” was retarded but Coker’s book really portrays how moronic and disturbing it was. The persistence in which Biggie seemed to dismiss the feud but was still caught up in it are, and I use this word advisedly, tragic.
Coker has apparently written a screenplay about Biggie’s life and he’s certainly the best one to do it; ‘Unbelievable’ is wonderful at dramatizing real events and turning them into “scenes” without sacrificing the real-life feeling of those events. That is to say, one gets the feeling of truth throughout the book but the hand of an author organizing a man’s life into a readable text is invisible. There’s a particularly affecting scene, wonderfully presented by Coker, where Biggie feels the repercussions for insulting (of all people) E-40. Apparently, Biggie, for an interview, “was asked to rate different rappers on a scale of one to ten” and “when asked about the Sacramento rap mogul”, Biggie (probably joking) gave him a big, fat zero (160). Months later, Biggie performed a show in Sacramento and after the show, was confronted with “twenty or thirty riders” on behalf of E-40 (160). Coker describes the scene primarily through quotations from DJ Enuff, but cuts-in with two significant lines of dialogue that highlight Biggie’s subtle form of bravado, the very thing that differentiated him from other rappers:
“My people is here,” E-40 told him.
“Yeah, I see them,” said Big. (161)
Coker’s book is full of well-wrought scenes like this one. Scenes that are based in real events but are elevated to an emotional level through Coker’s organization of quotations, facts, and tight but effective prose. Coker also has a firm grasp on his rap history and maintains an even-handed approach to Biggie’s life, presenting his inconstancies and negative aspects without “exposing” him, while taking a tough, but even-handed approach on the still-loaded East/West beef. I can’t really explain how rewarding this book is and I would encourage anyone that has not read it, to do so, particularly over the weekend that commemorates the man’s death. It would be a more fitting tribute than the questionable ‘Greatest Hits’ just released by Bad Boy.
“Questionable” however, seems to be the norm on anything related to Biggie. There are way too many “incompletes” in the rapper’s life, extending beyond the fact that his life was left incomplete when he was murdered at 24 (24! Think about that!). Obviously, there has been no conclusions related to his murder and whether one is interested in “justice” or not, the inconclusive aspects of the crime are pretty fucked-up. There’s also the legal weirdness with ‘Ready to Die’ which keeps Biggie’s best album and indeed, one of the best albums of all time, out of the hands of interested listeners. Recently, a rather idiotic list called ’The Definitive 200’ was published with the #59 spot belonging to ‘Life After Death’. I won’t complain about these kinds of lists nor will I suggest it as any kind of validation for rap that Biggie made the list, but I must say it is odd to choose ‘Life After Death’ over ‘Ready to Die’. Perhaps it has something to do with the legal limbo or whatever you want to call it, of ‘Ready to Die’ (the list is put out by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers), but it may also have to do with the tendency of music-types to prefer slightly inconsistent albums by artists rather than their truly, consistently great albums (‘Thriller’ over ‘Off the Wall’, ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ over ‘Innervisions’, ‘Exile on Main Street’ and ‘Let it Bleed’ as the highest-ranked Stones albums…). This kind of music-critic misinterpretation of an artists’ work is nothing new and it is even less surprising in relation to the rap world but the consistency in which aspects of Biggie’s musical career seems to get the shaft is particularly depressing. Think of that iTunes commercial where all of the musicians cram into a phone booth (Iggy Pop, Snoop, Bootsy Collins, Little Richard etc.) and then just as their all crammed in, we see the back of some guy dressed as Biggie and Madonna in her weird, Britishigan accent cries out “Biggie!” and its very funny because Biggie is fat. Of course, he’s also dead so it’s sort of weird and borderline offensive and would never happen with a dead rock music legend. Not that any of this matters too much, it just sort of stings, you know?
-Coker, Cheo Hodari. ‘Unbelievable.’ Three Rivers Press: New York, 2003.
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?