B.I.G and Me

I know everyone says they have eclectic musical tastes, but they're all lying except for me. If I bought more CDs online, it would totally screw up the Amazon recommendation list: you'd go to buy a Snoop Dogg album, and it'd say "Customers who bought this also bought Rod Stewart's The Great American Songbook Vol. 3 and Jets To Brazil's Orange Rhyming Dictionary." And when I really love an artist, I buy all of their albums.

One big result of this is that I end up with a lot of albums that I don't listen to regularly because my tastes have moved on (my complete collection of Get Up Kids CDs doesn't really see a lot of play, for instance). I try not to be one of those people who constantly assumes that now is the moment where he's achieved real musical maturity and that those CDs he bought a year ago are kids' stuff now. I can pop in 24 Hour Revenge Therapy now and then, and I still quite enjoy a song like "Do You Still Hate Me?" even if that kind of naked emotional earnestness stopped being the main thing I looked for in music somewhere around grade 11. So I listen to an oddly broad range of music at any given time: a little jazz here, a little classical there, some pop-punk now and then, a whole lot of hip hop, etc.

But there are a select few artists for whom my love runs just as deep now as it did when I first encountered them. And since they are few, I make a point of, at least once a year, taking a couple of weeks to re-engage with their entire oeuvre. I think most of these tend to be bands with multiple writers, who have a large body of work and a great deal of musical and lyrical variety: the examples that spring to mind are They Might Be Giants (surprise! I'm a nerd), Barenaked Ladies (fuck you, they're massively underrated), and the Beatles (yeah, that's right. I like the Beatles. Deal with it).

So my abiding love of the work of Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G, aka Biggie Smalls, aka the Black Frank White sort of sticks out as unusual: not because he's a hip-hop artist (I love a lot of hip hop), but because he only released two albums in his all-too-brief career. When you can spend two weeks every few months listening to nothing but the work of a man who put out fewer than 45 tracks during his life, you know there must be a special connection there. And it runs pretty deep. I go on 2-4 Biggie kicks a year lately, and every single time I end up spending a lot of time feeling really, really upset about the fact that he's gone. And he's been gone for about 13 years. He was gone a few months before I first encountered his music. And it just kills me, because as much as I love the work he completed during his career, I feel very confident I'd have loved the work he would have done in the intervening years even more.

But it can be hard to explain this attachment to other people. What's the connection between a middle class white slacker/academic (slackademic, to coin a phrase!!! neologism!!!) who grew up on the mean streets of suburban Nova Scotia and a black dude from Harlem who came up during one of the most horrifying periods of urban blight in modern American history? What could his work possibly say to me to make me care about it so much? Shouldn't my main engagement with his work be to cluck my tongue and criticize it for glorifying misogyny and violence and crime and materialism? By all rights, if I'm going to feel this passionately about a rapper, it should be an alternative hip-hop artist, a Mos Def, a Kweli, a Jean Grae. And I love all three of those artists. But not the way I love Biggie. Why?

Well, I obviously think there's more to his work than the things obnoxious white music journalists fret about even as they call him one of the greatest MCs of all time. I think there's something wonderful about it. And to try to explain just what that something may be, I'm going to start my blog's first regular feature: B.I.G and Me. I'll go, track by track, through Biggie's body of work, and try to explain what it is that I think is just so damn special about it. I hope you'll come along with me even if you're skeptical. I think I can win you over. Or, rather, I think Biggie can.

So the first song in question shall be "Party and Bullshit," a single Biggie released before either of his albums. And I'm going to say very little about it. I don't have a strong attachment to the song. Almost nothing about what makes Biggie so great seems to me to be in the song. The flow, the rhyme schemes, the beat, the lyrics, and even the voice just aren't there yet. It's mainly of interest so that you can see how quickly he took things to a whole other level once Puff signed him to Bad Boy and he didn't have to split his focus between hustling and rhyming. So in lieu of a discussion for this one, I'm going to post this totally awesome mash-up with Miley Cyrus, and save my energy for the really important stuff (which, I happen to think, is almost every single track on both of his albums):



Next up: "Things Done Changed," the first track on Ready To Die.