Happy Birthday and RIP to the one and only Notorious B.I.G. pic.twitter.com/ur6Ywr0cma
— HuffPost BlackVoices (@blackvoices) May 21, 2014
I am writing this and I am thinking that a kid under 12 may have no idea who Biggie Smalls is. Let me back track, they may have some idea who he is because he did have a movie come out in their life time but his last major release of original music was when I was in high school more than ten years ago. A 12 year old may think that Biggie Smalls is Jamal "Gravy" Woolard .They did not have that moment when Biggie song was a concept that they lived by and or when he telling your own personal story not in a line or a verse but whole albums. I listened to the Ready To Die Album from January 2004 to about August 2004, it was the only thing I listened to for the most part.
Hook:
I don't wanna live no more
Sometimes I hear death knocking at my front door
I'm living every day like a hustle
Another drug to juggle, another day, another struggle
I know how it feel to wake up fucked up
Pockets broke as hell, another rock to sell
People look at you like you's the user
Selling drugs to all the losers, mad buddha abuser
But they don't know about your stress-filled day
Baby on the way, mad bills to pay
That's why you drink Tanqueray, so you can reminisce
And wish you wasn't living so devilish, shit
I remember I was just like you
Smoking blunts with my crew, flipping over 6 to 2s
Cause G-E-D, wasn't B-I-G
I got P-A-I-D, that's why my mom's hate me
She was forced to kick me out, no doubt
Then I figured out nicks went for 20 down South
Packed up my tools for my raw power move
Glock nineteen for casket and flower moves
For chumps tryna stop my flow
And what they don't know will show on the autopsy
Went to see Papi to cop me a brick
Asked for some consignment and he wasn't trying to hear it
Smoking mad Newports cause I'm due in court
For an assault that I caught in Bridgeport, New York
Catch me if you can like the Gingerbread Man
You better have your gat in hand, cause man
The Notorious B.I.G. Everyday Struggle
Biggie Smalls was more than a rapper to me he was a concept, he was a lifestyle. He was relating to me at a time in my life when I had very little money and a few good options, because that is what some of his music is about. It was about the stressful times that many black males go through Biggie could tell those stories in a way I felt back then, and I still do now. You could tell Biggie had been there before. His lifestyle was equal dark and light. It was about having more does not make it easier to be alive. He related the stress of poverty to the world that was uniquely him. He was telling stories about having gold, clothes and women but those things, as evident though his music, did not make life easier. Having money does not make your life better at all it gets you is the trappings that life has which don't equal less stress or a happier life. Biggie was not a voyeur to the black experience.
Biggie Smalls was a black man in America telling our story. He talked programs being taken away from black communities "Damn, what happened to the summertime cookouts, Every time I turn around, a nigga getting took out". He talked about fashion" Your life is played out like Kwame and them fucking polka dots". He talked about giving his mother hell"Lying to my mother, even stealing out her purse,Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion. I know my mother wished she got a fucking abortion". Biggie Smalls was a complete rapper with many facets.
If you listen to any Biggie Smalls today think about how he made his music and how we are better for him making it. Even thou many don't know who Biggie Smalls is today his concepts that he stood for and his stories that he told are still just as real to me now as they were in the ninth grade. And most the things I liked in high school don't carry over to my life today
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