(Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1997 at age 24.) The book excels at big-picture analysis, taking the mission in its subtitle seriously. In lesser moments, it piles up malformed sentences and typos at an alarming clip, but if you can get past those, it serves as a solid and incisive if rarely revelatory summary of a hip-hop legend’s life and art. Tinsley starts with the early life of Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace - in her native Jamaica and her passage to New York. She saw America as a land of opportunity, much as her son would one day rap about the marvel of upward mobility in his hit single “Juicy.” Voletta settled in Brooklyn, where young Christopher would sit on their apartment stoop and watch the world go by: the hustlers, the working people, the schoolkids whom he would sometimes join in class, where he showed aptitude if not interest.īiggie’s real school was the street his goal was to make enough cash to ease his and his mother’s financial burden.
He figured out early what the local crack dealers were up to. He liked their nice clothes and fancy cars. As Tinsley writes, “For a teenager making thousands of dollars just off hand-to-hand transactions, school was never going to be able to compete.” This would be Biggie’s first career, and it would one day inform the crime stories that gave his best work its lived-in authenticity.
Tinsley is wise to the two-way street connecting drug dealing and hip-hop - each a means of moving up in the world, one much more dangerous than the other.
#The notorious big life after death zip crackĪs Biggie himself rapped on the haunting “Things Done Changed,” “If I wasn’t in the rap game, I’d probably have a key, knee-deep in the crack game.”īut Biggie was no dummy. He knew there was no such thing as a career selling crack. He also had friends who could hear his raw talent - his wordplay, his wicked sense of humor, his gift for vivid, cinematic storytelling. Those friends eventually led him to a young, headstrong music executive named Sean “Puffy“ Combs, whose vision for Biggie went beyond street tales and tapped into his unlikely but considerable sex appeal. “In the history of rap,” Tinsley writes, “it’s hard to think of many songs – if any exist – that serve as a more powerful introduction to an artist than ‘Juicy.’ In less than five minutes, Big managed to paint his life story in a way that, a quarter century later, the BBC would dub rap’s ‘quintessential Cinderella tale.’” Combs is a big reason we have songs like “Juicy” and “Big Poppa,” pop-savvy cuts that allow the listener to luxuriate in Biggie’s charm. Unfortunately, rap didn’t prove to be a long-term career either. Tinsley doesn’t break any new news on the double-barreled tragedy of Biggie and Tupac Shakur. Their unsolved drive-by murders - Shakur’s in 1996, Biggie’s just six months later - will always be connected in the public mind, as they have been through multiple investigations and theories involving police corruption, retribution and the storied beef between West and East Coast rappers.
#The notorious big life after death zip archive.