60 Songs That Explain the '90s - The Notorious B.I.G.—“Juicy”

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Rob explores the East Coast rapper the Notorious B.I.G.’s mainstream breakout single, “Juicy,” by discussing Biggie’s life and legacy as it compares to the narrative around him and his music. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Jon Caramanica Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-f-M-C-H-O-R-F-M-U-S-I-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-S-E-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. You know what the weirdest job? was in the music industry in the early 90s, being the guy on the blockbuster rap album who

pretends to talk with a gun in his mouth. This guy appears on both Dr. Dre's The Chronic and the notorious BIG's ready to die. I assume it's different guys, actually, but you never know. Maybe there's only one guy in the world who can do this convincingly, very specific skill set. First, we get Dr. Dre menacing the guy deep into the chronic in 1992. What's wrong, Nick? You can't talk with a gun in your mouth? What?

What? I mean? You can't talk with a gun in your mouth. Listen up, nigga. You know Lucifer. Nah. But you're about to meet you, motherfucker. Fantastic bass line.

By the way, it's a shame. The guy missed it. And then, deep into the notorious BIG's debut album, Ready to Die in 1994, on the song Who Shot You? Technically, it's a single from early 95, but it's on the Ready to Die reissue. Don't argue with me right now.

The poor guy with a gun in his mouth, his back, and now it's Biggie Smalls, menacing him. Six gunshots feels excessive to me. Let me ask you something. Can you picture either Dr. or the notorious B.I.G actually doing this to somebody. It's a macabre question, I realize. It's a macabre realize, but why are you listening to this music if you don't want to picture stuff like this? Is it frightening to you, this image, or is it just kind of gross? To me, it's mostly just gross. You know what frightens me?

The thought of Biggie's mother, the Letta Wallace, listening to her son, Christopher Wallace, pretending to put a gun in a guy's mouth, her disapproval, her revulsion, her fury, that frightens me. That compels me. Let me give you an example. I just watched this Netflix documentary Biggie. I got a story to tell. Came out in March 2021.

Mostly covers Biggie's early years, his childhood, his drug-dealing adolescence, The Road to Ready to Die. The best moment in this movie, the scariest moment in this movie, comes after a story told to us by his childhood friend, Damien Butler, D-Rock.

This is back during their drug-dealing adolescence. So the two guys are in Christopher's bedroom, and they've got a plate of crack, and they set it by the window to let it dry, and they leave the house for a couple hours, and they come back to discover that Christopher's mother, Valletta, has cleaned his room. And she says, why did you leave a plate full of days old mashed potatoes in your room? She'd scraped out the plate into the trash. I had no idea it was crack. She thought it was mashed potatoes. The camera then cuts from DRock to Valletta, who's sitting in a

beautiful living room, a lot of flowers, staring out these giant windows with warm light pouring through them. And this is what she says. Jesus Christ. That bastard. I never knew. I don't know if a human being can be so mad at a dead person. She's not finding out that they weren't mashed potatoes on camera, by the way. This is a classic Biggie story. It's a staple of the classic Biggie story industrial complex. It's in Cheo-Hadari-Koker's pretty fantastic biography on Biggie called Unbelievable, which came out back in 2003.

Old story, but I think we can agree that for her, this wound is still fresh. That was a big shocker. That means he brought it into my house. He disrespected my house. That's a hook, dude, the melodiousness of Biggie's mother's indignance.

It's a shame daft punk just retired. He brought it into it. to my house. He disrespected my house. It's awesome. It's terrifying. Her anger is still present tense in a way that makes her son present tense. And I am grateful. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. It's time for the notorious B.I.G. It's time for juicy. I'm going to love with you. I've been dreading this episode, the Biggie episode, the weight of it, the density, the tragedy, the morbidity. I don't really want to talk about two at all, for example, here, if that's all right with you. The Biggie and Tupac industrial complex,

their whole deal is pretty well documented at this point. Slate's slow burn podcasted a whole really great season on Biggie and Tupac back in 2019. There's several good movies about, there's several movies about Biggie and Tupac. We got it. You got it. Enough about Biggie and Tupac. These days, I find myself more interested in Christopher and Valletta, a boy. A boy. boy and his mother. The stories the boy tells about growing up with his mother and his mother's ongoing efforts to clarify the exaggerations in those stories. There's a dialogue happening here, still happening here. It's a combative dialogue, Jesus Christ, that bastard, but the love flowing between mother and son here, still flowing between mother and son, is a visceral thing

that I hear all over, juicy. And I'm grateful for that too. I know some of the people ready to die is dedicated to, according to Juicy, by the way. At this point, I think everyone does. This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I never amount to nothing. To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustling from that call the police on me when I was just trying to make some money to feed my daughter. But this album is really dedicated to his mother. I feel strongly about this. So how in-depth a Biggie Smalls primer do you even require at this point? How fast can I do this?

I'm going to try to go at 1.5 speed manually. Christopher George Latour Wallace, born in Brooklyn in 1972, raised by a single mother, Valletta and Bedstie, the border of Clinton Hill and Bedstey. Bedstey sounds cooler. His mother tried to keep him out of trouble, try to protect him from the seedy allure of Fulton Street in the 80s, especially, to the point of virtually forbidding young Christopher from leaving the house or the stoop. Young Christopher leaves the stoop. This is the crack era. He starts selling crack. Those aren't mashed potatoes. Also, he soon discovers that he might be the

greatest rapper in history. Deep, booming, warm, menacing, awe-inspiring voice. Like if the Grand Canyon were a person. Like if Brooklyn, in all its glory and atrocity, could be distilled into a person. How many rappers in history do you suppose have rhymed Rolexes with Lexus? My sincere guess is 400,000, but young Christopher is the only one who makes you feel every glorious atom of every syllable of the word Rolexes. You could live forever like royalty in that one word when he says it. He battles a few guys and annihilates them basically by standing next to them. He's six foot plus and weighs 300. He makes a demo tape that winds up in the hands of one Sean Puffy Combs, producer, rapper, executive, narcissist, visionary, dancer all up in the videos. He signs young Christopher to Uptown Records, Heavy D, Jodacy, etc. Except Puff Daddy gets fired from Uptown Records for acting like Puff Daddy.

And so instead, Puff ascends to the mountaintop via his new label, Bad Boy, whose kingmaking star attraction is one Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Black Frank White, aka the notorious B.I.G. His first song is called Party and Bullshit. He is a high school dropout who already knows more about the world than most college graduates. He is a daughter. He is married to R&B singer Faith Evans. His mother disapproves of the vast majority of everything he's doing at this point,

and his debut album, Ready to Die, comes out in 1994 and might be the greatest rap album in history. If you don't know, now you know. That could have been faster. And shorter. I got hung up on Rolex's there for a second, as one does. So by 1994, New York City is not the end-all be-all of rap music anymore. Arguably, it's not even the epicenter of rap music anymore,

depending on how obsessed you were with the West Coast, with L.A., with Dr. Dre's The Chronic, on which Dr. Dre wistfully raps the following. And now, in the first ten seconds of Thames and changed on this side, remember they used to thump, but not a blast, right? things done changed, the first actual song on Biggie's Ready to Die, amid the three other major samples already colliding in mid-air, there's Dre again. And I am grateful for this, too, for the bridge this builds, however tenuous between Biggie and Dre,

between Bad Boy Records and Death Row records, between the East Coast and the West Coast. Things Done Changed is luxurious and vicious, all the guns, the chalk body outlines, the actual bodies, the parents terrified of their own pager-wielding children. But Biggie saves his single hardest line for last. Shit, my mama got cancer and oppressed. Don't ask me why I'm motherfucking strapped. Things done change.

The Leto Wallace would beat cancer. She would survive cancer. The letter Wallace would survive her son. This album came out in September 94, which means that by October 94, New York City is functionally a giant parking lot in which every car is blasting a different song from Ready to Die. It's quite harmonious, really.

Nod your head approvingly at whichever car you like, though maybe avoid the cars blasting the stick-up anthem, Gimmee the Lute. If aliens are ever about to blow up planet Earth and only two-thirds of the world's population will fit in our escape shuttles, maybe let's just leave behind you one-third of the world's population who still thinks that there are two different rappers on Gimmy the Lute,

and don't realize that it's just biggie, already flaunting his dramatic range. Hold up. He got a fucking bitch in the car. Burr coats and diamonds. She thinks she a superstar. Oh, Biggie, let me jack her in the back. Hit her with the gait. Chill, shoddy. Let me do that.

I picture his mother listening to that, just gazing out the window. Biggie pulls the same trick on warning in which he basically notifies himself of an imminent robbery attempt against himself, an attempt that is, of course, doomed to catastrophic failure, the red dots, etc. Florida, the Pim Corridor, called the coroner. It's going to be a lot of slow singing if flower bringing if my burglar alarm starts ringing. I have this really unpleasant memory of Jeremy Piven rapping the whole first verse of warning

during some random TV interview, but I can't find that video now, which means that it's possible that I made it up, which is even more unpleasant, if you're me. Let's dip back into the classic Biggie Story industrial complex. Brooklyn's own Easy MoB produced a bunch of early Biggie tracks, and he likes to talk about how disturbed he was the first time he heard Biggie wrap these lines

from Ready to Die, the song. So Easy MoB says, do you even hear what you just said? and Biggie says, yeah, and Easy Mo B says, fuck your moms. And Big says, I'm just trying to say that I'm ready to die for this shit.

This is urgent. You got to be willing to do whatever you got to do to make this paper. There are 400,000 rappers out there who are willing to say anything. And maybe five rappers in history

who sound like they mean it. Biggie was one of them. You can also feel every atom of every syllable of his various sex boasts, whether you're into that sort of thing or not. As ready to dieus, meanness, cleanness,

you never seen this stroke a genius. As ready to die progresses, the mood darkens and hardens. And on songs like Everyday Struggle, you get a panoramic view of 80s and 90s, Brooklyn, both the glory and the atrocity. And you can hear the urgency in his voice intensifying as the music around him gets prettier. I'm singing body after body,

and I'm mayor Giuliani. He ain't trying to see no black man turn the John Gotti. And then comes the song Suicidal Thoughts, which ends the original album and ends with Biggie attempting suicide, the gunshot, the dropped phone. After he's wrapped at length about his remorse and shame and self-loathing, a central tenet of the classic Biggie story industrial complex is that ready-to-die-to-die-to-die-die-to-die-in-epa-ote. The Puff Daddy is one of the producers and the central sonic architect is the director and Biggie's in the leading role. Think Coppola and Pacino, or Scorsesee and De Niro. Frankly, I picture Puff, sophomore as a Nancy Myers type, like getting really into the layouts of the kitchens. But suicidal thoughts is the bleak and shocking twist ending.

One last brutal reminder of how much big means all of it. It's enough to make you almost wish you were one of those people whose personal version of ready to die as a person. version of Ready to Die has only two songs on it. Another central tenet of the classic Biggie story industrial complex is that he was leery of his slicker, poppier, cheeryer songs. Puff had to talk big into recording them. Puff insisted they'd make Biggs famous, and Puff being right a lot of the time is maybe the single most maddening thing about Puff. Biggie gravitated toward the songs with, let's say, an 80s Fulton Street attitude. The grime, the menace, the almost erotic sense of danger. Think unbelievable. Think me and my bitch. But on this album, it was Big Papa that made him truly famous.

That's and juicy. Here comes the first line of Big's first verse. You know it. It was all a dream. I used to read Word Up magazine. And already this song is famous. Already an all-timer. It took three seconds. You can feel the hunger in his voice and you can hear the awe in his voice as it dawns on him in this moment that his heart hunger might actually be sated. This is the moment where Biggie makes it, the moment where he ascends the mountaintop and maybe climbs onto the cross. I'm looking on eBay right now, and for $155, I can buy a copy of the September 1997 issue

of WordUp magazine. It's an excellent condition. Both Biggie and Tupac are on the cover. Tupac's picture is a little bigger because he's shirtless. The cover line is why they'll never die with an exclamation point. I'm grateful for that exclamation point. But my single favorite thing about Juicy Now is the never-ending multimedia Valletta Wallace fact-checking of Juicy. This is a song about how hard Christopher Wallace used to have it, and he did come of age in 1980s, Brooklyn, and he did never really know his father.

He did for a time deal drugs to support both him and his daughter, but Valletto would like to come clarify that he didn't have it this hard. For example, Miletto would like to clarify that they never actually had sardines for dinner. We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us. No heat. Wonder why Christmas missed us. Beleta would like to clarify that Christmas never missed them, even though she was a Jehovah's Witness and therefore did not technically celebrate Christmas. Thinking back on my one-room shack Now my mom pimps are act With minks on the back

Villetta would like to clarify That their Brooklyn apartment Had seven and a half rooms The one-room Is Biggie's bedroom The one with the mashed potatoes For the record Everyone's bedroom

Is a one-room shack And she loved to show me off Of course smiles every time my face is up in the sauce This is the moment In the Juicy video Of course were Valletta herself appears, smiling as she reads an issue of the source. Biggie's not even on the cover. Easy

E is on the cover. But like five seconds later, she and Christopher are reenacting a fight in their kitchen and she throws something at him from across the room. I'm not sure what. Maybe a handful of mashed potatoes. Maybe this is a reenactment. Maybe it's not. At this point, Christopher's got a lot to answer for. Super Nintendo Sega Genesis. When I was dead broke, man, I couldn't picture this. A striking detail in the biggie biography, unbelievable, is the list of all the stuff. Valletta Wallace bought her young son in a vain attempt to keep him from leaving the house and going down to Fulton Street. She bought him the boombox he wanted.

He wanted either the Sharp or the Sony. She bought him the fat boys and run DMC tapes he wanted. And she bought him the video games he wanted. At that point, most kids wanted either an Atari or an Intellivision or a Kaliko vision. But young Christopher had all three. I think even back then on Juicy, he could picture owning two video game systems. But I like picturing this too. As songs like this get older and grow timeless,

and it gets harder to picture the specifics of the era in which they were made, one strategy you might employ is to picture the rapper playing a video game that was popular the year the song came out. So like the notorious B.I.G. playing toe jam and Earl or whatever. I'm speculating. There's dudes playing Street Fighter 2 in the Juicy video. which I appreciate. It's Chunli versus Raiu. This works for producers, too.

The beat for juicy, as you might know, is a flip of the 1983 hit Juicy Fruit from the Funk Soul Group M-2-May. Is Flip the right word? Flip sounds a little too forceful. In what would grow to be the grand, puffy tradition, the juicy beet is more just juicy fruit

jostled slightly. You can picture Puff just hitting play on juicy fruit, but like extravagantly. There is some dispute as to who actually made this beat. The great Pete Rock has insisted for years that he cooked up the original version

and Puff just basically stole it. But Juicy is officially credited to Puff and Polk. He has production duo The Trackmasters, poke, and tone. I read an interview with those guys where they talk about spending a lot of time in the early 90s at a video arcade at 47th and Broadway and Manhattan

playing a basketball arcade game called Run and Gun. You remember that one? I vaguely do. It did not quite reach NBA Jam, level of cultural saturation. But yeah, picture one of the dudes who officially produced

juicy playing run and gun. It costs four quarters to play a whole 12-minute basketball game. Polk and tone say that they met

Steve Stout there, the record executive. They all played run and gun together. I don't know. It helps me see the era a little clearer. It's just a thought.

I really like Puff on the chorus, actually, murmuring so good. It's all good in the deep background. Like he's whispering it directly

into Biggie's ear. Just rap the fucking song. It's going to make you famous. You don't have to like it. We'll put unbelievable on the B-side. Just do it. And Biggie did it. Juicy hit number one on the Billboard Rap Singles chart.

Crack the top 40 of the Hot 100. This is not impressive chart-wise, really, but 25 years later, it's probably top 10 most famous rap songs of all time. Ready to Die eventually went six times platinum, sold six million copies in the United States alone. Biggie was famous. Biggie was immortal.

His next album in 1997 was a double album called Life After Death. That one went diamond. More than five million copies of a double album sold in the U.S. The first full song on Life After Death is called Somebody's Gotta Die. And in the first few lines, we see that Big has upgraded his dreams substantially. I'm sitting in the crib dreaming about Lear Jets and pooh. The way salt shooops and how to sell records like Snoop. the time life after death was in stores, Biggie was already gone. Christopher Wallace was shot and

killed on March 9, 1997. He was 24. Tupac Shakura died of gunshot wounds on September 13th, 1996. I don't want to talk about it. But I do want to propose that Juicy also helps us see what Tupac and Biggie might have seen in each other. As the Biggie and Tupac Industrial Complex is happy to remind you, they were real-life friends long before they became magazine cover enemies. Tupac loved party and bullshit. And each man had something the other man wanted in terms of reputation, in terms of persona.

In Unbelievable, the biggie biography, Shea O'Dari Koker writes about Tupac's childhood. He says, Shakur recalled many times when his family had nothing to eat and no money. He would get picked on and teased because of his raggedy secondhand clothes. To Big, this

represented a realness that he had never experienced. Shakur grew up without Kaliko Vision. Designer clothes or expensive stereo equipment. Every day really was a struggle. What Tupac might have saw in Big, what he envied in Bigg, was Fulton Street. Was that street credibility, which is a different kind of struggle. What we all struggle with now is how to separate these two flawed, fascinating, hyper-talented, but emphatically mortal men from the Biggie and Tupac Industrial Complex. We worship these guys now, many of us, and we worship their music, but we also abstract them

as people nearly beyond recognition. You're nobody till somebody kills you, but the first time somebody paints you into a mural, you become somebody else. So we've got to take the shreds of humanity where we can find them. And all these years later, it's still often Valletta Wallace

who supplies that humanity for me. Biggie and Tupac, the Nick Broomfield documentary from 2002, like I was saying earlier, it's one of the movies that feeds into all that myth-making. It's mostly Nick Broomfield conspiracy theorizing.

walking around with his long, dumb microphone, bothering people. I find it very stressful. I can only really handle this movie when Valletta is on screen. First thing Nick says about her is that she yells at him for bothering people.

He says, She insisted that I adopt a more ingratiating style. Later on, we watch her yell at Biggie's old friend, Lil C's when he can't figure out where to park his car. It's fantastic.

At one point, Nick asks her how she described her son as a person. He was somebody at times you want to kill, you want to strangle. But I'm his mother. You know, he was a very generous person. He was a gentle at times, very loving, very sincere.

And by then, she'd already quite vividly described her son's music. Was it filth? Yes, it was filth. Some of it was filth. But it was a filthy story, a story that was out there. a story that he wanted to be told. The foundation of the classic Biggie Story Industrial Complex is that Biggie himself was one of the great storytellers in rap history.

Think warning. Think I got a story to tell. Think me and my bitch. But he was never more compelling than when he was telling his own story, even when he fudged it. Even when he added a few guns in people's mouths or forgot to mention a video game system or three. And what keeps juicy present tense for me,

and keeps Christopher Wallace present tense for me is that I still hear it as their story, a boy and his mother. My guest today is the one, the only. John Caramonica, pop critic, already interrupting me. Pop critic for the New York Times, host of the New York Times pop cast,

International Sensation, John Caramonica, welcome. Sir. I am, I'm moisturized extra for this. I did. You can hear it. You can hear it. You can hear. Oh, it's true. That's true. The dewyness all the way from the skin, all the way to the vocal tone. We'll get to that. Rob, what a joy. What a privilege.

It is an absolute joy to hear your voice to see your face to talk to you about Bicky Smalls today. John, thank you so much for being here. My severe privilege to do this. We'll see, but okay. So much has been written about Biggie at this point. So many movies, so many podcasts. Is there a specific element of Biggie's craft or his personality that? that's been lost, or at least obscured by all of this canonization? Like, what do we not talk enough about when we talk about Biggie? You know, I was thinking about this very question a lot in the wake of the recent Netflix documentary, because obviously history gets ossified based on who's writing it or who remembers it, but also, like, people that we've lost, people that we've lost young, they tend to get fixed into certain poses, certain postures.

certain perspectives. And it's easy to forget that those poses or postures are distillations of a much more complicated and varied life. And so my thing with Biggie and something that obviously is almost like no way to mitigate, but the tragic circumstance of how he was lost and the kind of chaos that was happening in hip-hop during the mid-90s that led to that can be louder sometimes than the musical legacy and also the parts of the musical legacy that don't necessarily comport with the larger arc of rap history.

And so that stresses me out. That worries me. And I'm glad, one of the things I was glad to see in the doc was, I just feel like you see facial expressions that you don't even think of as biggie facial expressions. And it's just like a very healthy reminder

that, like, when we are fed history, when we are fed certain narratives, we are really being fed a fixed micro version of someone. Also, hip hop has changed so much over these 25 years that the things that Biggie did, that I think if you were a younger person looking back at it, and you'd be like, well, okay, it's hard to remember just how exceptional they were at the time. And just how unusual, how so generous they felt in that moment. I mean, you can't imagine things that literally every single kid on SoundCloud does now.

And it's super normalized and an accepted part of the genre, whether it's presentational or musical. These are choices that felt shocking in 1993, 1994. They were things that were testing the boundaries of the genre at that time. And we forget that now because so much of it is just woven into the DNA. now. Right. And it does not compute for me that he was 24. Blueface is 24. I just, I cannot picture. Damn, you Googled. I just Googled that just now. I don't know how old Blueface is organically. I googled that fact for you. Blueface is a charming young man with a challenging Instagram presence. What did Biggie mean to you in real time? Oh, I thought you were saying, what did he biggie mean to

blueface. We'll get him in here later. I'm not sure I was prepared for that question. A couple things. One, being from New York, growing up listening to New York radio, hearing a voice

with that dexterity, that authority, that storytelling gift, that theatricality, you know, wit, humor, self-deprecation, those were radical new fresh concepts

to be all in one person. When you think of even the New York hip-hop of two to three years prior, extremely lyrically intense, good storytelling, but maybe not with the sense of grandeur that Puff brought to Biggie.

That's where the iterative changes. Puff basically takes it and make something genuinely cinematic out of it. Also, just, you know, hometown hero shit, right? It's exciting that the best rapper on the planet is from the borough that you grew up in. Like, that's, that's an incredible way to feel and, like, I'm sure that people who grew up in L.A. felt that way about NWA, or, you know,

people who grew up in the Bay felt that way about two shorter E-40 or whatever. It's a specific micro thing, but I remember the intensity of the feeling that he was of where we were from. Like, that mattered. And then also, during that time period, you know, I was de facto, you know, I was DJing College Radio. And it was like very exciting to get those 12 inches. Like to, as those things were being serviced, you'd be like, oh, my God, like another, you know, like juicy on one side. Unbelievable. And the other side, like, oh, what?

This is crazy. And those things, those, they became almost like a fetish items in a way. They were so special and got just a tremendous amount of play. It's, look, it wasn't a secret, right? I mean, these are like globally popular records. But there were something that still felt like a little local. a little private, a little personal about them, at least for me at that time. Because, right, because the historical narrative now is that New York rap was struggling at that point,

or at least they didn't have an answer to the chronic or dog style. They didn't have an equivalent superstar figure. Like, do you think that's true, or is that, in a sense, like New York, as usual, just agonizing over its own clout? Here's what I think New York didn't have. And I don't think it's that it didn't have a superstar, you know, or didn't have a king. or a kingmaker or queen. You know, it's like you have Rakim.

You have De La Sol and Tribe Call Quest, and you have Big Daddy Kane. And it's not that there's not great rappers in New York. You have KRAS 1. You know, it's not that you don't have era-defining rappers. It's not that you don't have rappers who don't have national attention. It's not that. But the thing that the chronic did,

and I almost don't even know if it did. it intentionally or it just was a byproduct of just how big the chronic became. But the sense that the music that was made in your neighborhood or in your town could actually become not just defining for hip-hop as a whole, wherever people were playing it, but could be defining for all of American pop culture. The suburbs, yeah. That notion was still very, very fresh, was still novel. And so I think what you hear in the first Biggie Smalls album is this, it's not even a tug of war, right?

It's a little bit of an evolution. It's saying, yeah, Biggie, I mean, if you go back pre-juicy, you go to party and bullshit, Biggie wraps his ass off. We all accept that. We all know that. But we also know that there is this possibility that if you make songs that are a little bit softer around the edges, a little bit more melodically sophisticated, a little bit more historically. ear-minded, if you make a song like that, you might reach people who never knew that party

and bullshit existed. You could possibly reach young people and old people. You can reach black folks and white folks and everybody else. You have the potential to blanket. And that is really what this first album, that's the story that this album is telling, because you have songs that are like real rapper songs. Yeah. I mean, probably my favorite songs are like the real rapper songs on this record.

And his too, yeah. Undoubtedly, but you also have these other songs that, again, in 2021, don't seem like concessions. But at that time, those were things that people were, like, actively debating. You mentioned that in Netflix documentary. I got a story to tell it. One of my favorites parts of that is when they talk about his voice, like the percussion of his voice, like being like a Max Roach drum solo. Is the deification of Biggie, like, the instigation of Biggie, like, the instillation. deification of Biggie as a rapper. Is that more about technique, or is that more about his personality? I think the deification is probably a little bit more personality-driven. It's important to remember

that this time period is still a time period where technical expertise really matters. Right. It's very, very hard to become a super popular rapper in the early to mid-90s without being also what we would think of as a classically skilled rapper. That is changed. Or the notion of skill has changed. We'll leave that to the Twitter wars about who has, you know, like, I don't want to have like a Playboy Cardi conversation right now. You know.

But at that time, you had to be able to spit. It was just like very, very straightforward. You had to be able to spit. So the deification, it's obvious that he could spit. It's obvious. But the fact that he was able to take that. and make something so epic and grand out of it, that's the deification combined, of course,

with the horrible circumstances of 96-97. I mean, this is really, I actually can't really overstate the loss of innocence moment that that, like, 12 to 18-month period was. I mean, these are the people pocking big who had been advertised to us as the people who would carry the genre into the future. The future, right.

The people who were setting aesthetic trends, the people who were leading celebrities, I mean, Bach was a movie star in addition to a rapper. These kind of meta-narratives about East Coast, West Coast, and Bad Boy Death Row, like, these were loud stories, you know, whether they were completely 100% right all the time. It's obviously more complicated. But to have that all ripped away in 96 and 97 was really damaging. and I think you could not help but DFI both of them.

There was no option at that point because something kind of irretrievable had been lost. Right. No one's ever going to feel, at least no one of my generation is ever going to feel about hip-hop in 98, the way they felt in 95, because something was completely ripped away.

And something was proven to be far more, fragile than it appeared from outside. Right. How influential, how culpable do you think 90s rap media was when it came to Biggie and Tupac, how that escalated and how it ended? Was tragedy inevitable there? Did all those magazine covers actively help push that situation toward tragedy? It's a tough question because, I mean, I obviously should caveat this by saying, like,

a lot of the people who were at the magazines at that era, like my dear friends, my mentors, like the people who taught me how to do what I do and how to do what I love. It was the biggest story, and it was at their doorstep. Right. And they could tell it in a way that other outlets could not tell it. Nobody else could. I mean, I know that the people who were there, they sometimes will think back about that era and wonder if things could have been handled differently or if it could have been a more

proactive instead of amplifying the tension. Maybe it could have been aimed towards easing the tensions. At the same time, what was happening with Biggie and Pock, the stuff that ends up in the magazines is only a fraction of what's really out there. There's a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff, street stuff, gang stuff, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's just not in the media. You know, it's not being covered. And not that. it should be necessarily or could be, but I say that only to underscore that what was going on between those two camps was ultimately much bigger than isn't on the cover of Vibe, isn't on the cover of the source.

Yeah. And so I think it's tough. Like, these are ethical questions we think about, you know, even to this day, as far as covering rappers in crime and going into jail or coming out of jail or the way that lyrics do or do not you know uh d a's holding artist lyrics against them right i mean these are these are ongoing questions and i think the ethical obligations for journalists are to tell the true stories or the truest possible story that you can i think in the case of how rat magazines in the mid-90s hand but i mean i don't think the right approach would have been to turn away from it right but it's

also, it's just tough to know because there were so many parts of that story and which we've learned. You mentioned the kind of Biggie and Pock Industrial Complex, all these sort of like documentaries or true crime TV shows or books, various books from investigators and so on and so forth, the amount that we now know about those circumstances that we didn't know then really makes it clear that what was happening in rat magazines at the time was ultimately, I don't want to say a sliver, but it was like certainly not the whole story. Right. When I watch those documentaries or even watch the juicy video, like, I'm drawn to his mother. I'm drawn to the letter as like a personality. But I worry about that. I worry about like reducing her to a stock character. You know, she lost her son. And even today, she still spends much of her life like on camera talking about her son, telling stories, refuting narratives. Like, is there a humanity that's lost when we talk about one person and one person's family this much? Like, do we lose sight of these people as just people? it's tough to know because I think there are people who have been in similar circumstances

who've completely receded from the public eye who have chosen to just say, I don't want to deal with it. It's not for me. I think continuing to sort of like honor her son's legacy, perhaps as the thing that is the most generative for her. So maybe I'm alone in this. I don't know. But even now in 2021, like I don't want to watch that Netflix documentary and not hear her perspective. Of course. And also, the kind of depth and nuance of how he was as a young person, which is one of the things I think this, this documentary was, like, useful for and interesting. It added a lot of texture to our understanding of a young Christopher Wallace. I want to hear that. I need her to hear it. And I also,

I like that she's even like being awakened to certain things, like learning about him and, like, being open to, it's not fixed in her mind. She's like learning new information and feeling new things about it. That's really powerful. And I think that's, unfortunately, the narrative of his life was cut short, but the way we tell these stories for decades and decades and decades needs that layer, I think, in order to be really, really powerful and to be even the most powerful, it can be. Just to wrap up, like, what do you remember about the aftermath after he died? Like you say, there was a vacuum, you know, and there was just a loss of innocence. Like, How long did that last and what sort of pulled rap music out of it?

I think anybody of my generation could tell you where they were when they found out. I remember I was up. I was finishing my college thesis late in night. It was like the last week of working on it. And the girl who lived next door to me in the dorm, Ruby, shout out Ruby, knocked on my door and told me that Biggie had gotten shot. And, you know, this was overnight. So it must have been like three, four in the morning.

on the East Coast and it's I mean you can tell it's still like a little unsettling right like it's still a little unsettling to me

to feel that deeply about it when you're a fan of something and you know you associate it with joyful moments in your life and your own developing growth and maturity

and personality and presence in the world world. Yeah. And then it gets taken away. It's hard to feel like you're standing on flat ground. Yeah. And I remember that very vividly.

I mean, I'm still, like, literally in this moment, I'm feeling it. I guess it must have been 98. I can't quite remember. Well, you know, when Puff started putting out records and, you know, every breath you take and the Loxid will always love Big Papa. Like, obviously those are big records. I remember they felt like it felt like it felt like it was the tail. end of a narrative. Right. John, thank you so much for being here. This has been wonderful. Again, it is wonderful to hear your voice, to see your face, to be interrupted by you only a few times.

I know. I was trying to be nice. It's enthusiasm, and I appreciate it. That's right. Put it in my Apple podcast comments. Write it in the comments. It's enthusiasm. This is a Spotify exclusive, John, but thank you. It's a feature, not a bug. Thank you for being here, John. Of course. Thanks very much to our guest this week, the great John Caramanica. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales and Isaac Lee. And thanks to you, as always, for listening. And now, without further ado, here is The Notorious B.I.G.

With Juicy. We'll see you next week.