But in 1992, Biggie’s childhood friend and running buddy Roland (Olie) Young was killed by his uncle, Carl (I-God) Bazemore, in a street dispute, and afterward, Biggie turned hard toward music.īy that time, Biggie had already appeared in the Source magazine’s Unsigned Hype column. Even Easy Mo Bee, who produced six songs on “Ready to Die,” describes driving onto Fulton to see if Biggie was on the block, offering to take him for rides as a strategy for disentangling him from his street business. And for a while, the two careers commingled.
One time, he left crack out to dry in his bedroom, and his mother, thinking it was old mashed potatoes, threw it out.īefore he was offered a pathway into the music business by Sean Combs, then Puff Daddy, selling drugs was Biggie’s most likely route. Eventually, he was selling crack, and the operation he and his crew ran took in a few thousand dollars a week, according to an old interview excerpted in the film.
The drug bazaar on Fulton Street, just around the corner from the stoop his mother rarely let him stray from, beckoned him and his friends. Harrison’s mentoring, though, is only one part of Biggie’s childhood education. It recounts childhood time spent in Jamaica, where his mother was born and where much of his family still resides, leaving largely unspoken the way that Jamaican toasting and melody slipped into his rapping. It delves into the relationship between his parents: Voletta Wallace, who has become a public face of mourning and grief, and the father he barely knew. The story that “Biggie” - directed by Emmett Malloy, and reliant upon ample ’90s videotape shot by Biggie’s childhood friend Damion (D-Roc) Butler - wants to tell is about how Christopher Wallace became Biggie Smalls, not how Biggie Smalls changed the world. For so long, Biggie has been enshrined as a legend, a deity - it unclenches your chest a bit to see him depicted as human. A little bit later, he’s goofily singing Jodeci’s “Freek’n You,” a slithery classic of ’90s R&B. The first footage you see in “Biggie” is of the rapper, then in his early 20s, shaving and joking about trying to hold tight to looking like his 18-year-old self.
Almost two and a half decades later, the Biggie Smalls narrative (music aside) often feels reduced to a few image touchstones, or even just facial expressions, to say nothing of the generations-later conflation of the Biggie and Tupac story lines into one, especially given that their musical careers told very different tales about hip-hop at that time. who was one of the most commercially successful and creatively impactful rappers of the 1990s, and whose 1997 murder was a wound to the genre that remains unsolved - history has perhaps been unreasonably flattening. Memory - history - is what’s left standing when all the rough edges are sandpapered down. Both of them are lighthearted, two young rising stars finding a little respite with each other.
That’s clear from footage of that same day - from their friend era - which appears late in the new Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell.” They’re sitting at a table together, and Tupac is rapping for Biggie, an optimal audience. And Biggie and Tupac were friends before they became rivals. Photos are incomplete snapshots, of course. They look a little standoffish to each other, two people taking a photo they’re not quite interested in sharing with the other. Pac is on the right, in a THUG LIFE beanie and a black leather vest over a skull-and-bones T-shirt, extending both middle fingers. Biggie is on the left in a checkered headband, posed tough, toothpick jutting out of his mouth. and Tupac Shakur standing side by side, but just one that’s truly canonical. There are only a few known photographs of the Notorious B.I.G.