Where many of even the greatest storytelling rap songs were usually driven by a single protagonist and the string of events he or she encountered, Big presented multiple scenes and intertwined characters with a journalistic eye for the specifics. What else could account for such precision? For Biggie, every blunt ash was immaculately documented in rhyme.
But make no mistake, there was a meticulousness to his craft. In late interviews, before his death at age 24, Big was one of the first rappers to vocally run the “I don’t really care about rap, I’m in it for the money” line. Big is much more complex and unknowable than the ubiquitous T-shirt portrait of him as a sullen king, wearing a crown. And that, too, is just one version of a composite of characters that in his passing have been made use of, dumbed down and commodified.
Later, though, he bestowed himself with perhaps a more appropriate nickname: “Rap Alfred Hitchcock.” The boast may have been a simple comment on how Big’s rotund figure projected a silhouette similar to the filmmaker, but there’s a deeper spiritual bond between the two-the detail obsession of full-blown perfectionists. Christening himself Black Frank White, Big gave a nearly oxymoronic nod to Walken’s King of New York drug lord. Despite being mythologized and simplified as fat, cockeyed, dark skinned and draped in Coogi, Notorious BIG’s best-known alter ego was a play on a Christopher Walken character.
0 kommentar(er)
