He’d draw out certain syllables to unforgettable effect. Whenever he jumped on a track he did so with an authority and explosiveness that was apparent from the opening bar. Later, in a Yo! MTV Raps interview, Big would dismiss the tape that changed his life as “the little garbage demo.” The self-cynicism of an obsessive artist.īiggie wasn’t just hard on himself, he was simply hard on record. “Microphone Murder” earned him inclusion in the prestigious Unsigned Hype column in The Source, which then drew the attention of Puffy and Bad Boy, the more hardcore oriented label the young producer was building in the wake of his R&B successes with Jodeci and Mary J. Listen to “Microphone Murder,” a cut from his first demo tape set to a gruff sample of The Emotions’ “Blind Alley”: My words are harder than a brick, Chinese arithmetic, a thick stick and my dick. Check the now-legendary footage of him, at just 17, freestyling in front of a Brooklyn corner store where his presence is as commanding as any professional. For most of his peers-the greats-there exists a paper trail, however thin, of their evolution-an awkward guest appearance, a sloppy demo, an under-polished underground album-but there are very few Biggie verses on tape anywhere that are anything less than perfectly structured and delivered. Big entered the game as a fully-formed great rapper, with seemingly no blemishes on his track record. This foundation building is made even more impressive when considering that for most of his career, he composed lyrics in his head with no pen or pad.Įqually mind blowing is how these skills came to be, borne practically from nothing. On “Gimmie the Loot,” Ready To Die’s standout heist track, he runs down the five Ws in the opening bars: Who? My man Inf. 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.