2020 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees Week
The Song of the Day is:
The Notorious B.I.G. – “Juicy”
From the album Ready To Die (1994)
It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine
Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin’ pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
I let my tape rock ’til my tape popped
Smokin’ weed in Bambu, sippin’ on Private Stock
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack
With the hat to match
Christopher Wallace – James Mtume
With still no concrete plans for this coming January 20th, we will continue on with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees week. Today we are celebrating the music and legacy of Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, one of rap music’s most influential stars. It’s been since 2017 that a rap act has been inducted to the Hall (much too long). That year, Biggie’s professional rival Tupac Shakur was nominated in his first year of eligibility. Biggie is a first year inductee as well, and I frankly think that with the upcoming slate of rappers becoming eligible soon (Jay-Z, Eminem, Missy Elliott), along with the growing pool of already eligible rap acts that have been thus far denied entry (Outkast, LL Cool J, Salt n Pepa, Wu- Tang Clan), that we be justifiably seeing a rap act inducted every year (maybe even two in a year! Oh my!). I am not one who subscribes to the idea that rap doesn’t belong in the Rock Hall, I can get see beyond the semantics of the institution’s title and also draw a direct line from rock music to rap. I believe the Hall should already contain more rappers and, for God’s sake, a female rapper should be enshrined. Anyway, our man of the hour is is the Notorious B.I.G., who restored New York City as a hub of the rap world amid LA’s gangsta rap reign. Biggie was a complicated person, who admitted to his past as a drug dealer, but gave hope to those who came from the same environment. His style was uniquely his, an unhurried delivery that frankly sounded like it came from a big man, like Barry White before him, he seemed to make his size work in his favor. He would often employ backing tracks from 70’s and 80’s quiet storm hits. On “Juicy”, his breakthrough song, he raps over the beat of “Juicy Fruit”, an 8-week number one R&B hit in1983, by soul/funk band Mtume. “It was all a dream”, which opens the first verse, and the later “If you don’t know, now you know, (expletive)” are two of the most famous phrases the rapper ever turned, extending way beyond his core fanbase. He only had two albums in his lifetime, two classics with macabre titles: Ready to Die and Life After Death (released just sixteen days after his own death). Biggie was a casualty of the mid-nineties East Coast/West Coast rap feud, having gotten fatality shot four times in a drive-by shooting on March 9, 1997. He was only 24. There’s been a lot of speculation to the roles the he and Tupac Shakur played in each other’s death (Tupac had also been killed in a drive-by shooting a half year prior) , but no arrests were ever made in either case. From everything that I’ve heard, it seems like Shakur and his label head Marion “Suge” Knight were much more the aggressors in perpetuating the feud. In contrasting the two rappers skills, my wife made the analogy that Tupac was the poet and Biggie was a journalist, a fair point for his vivid tales of life on the street. The Notorious B.I.G. will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by his frequent collaborator and label-head Sean “Puff Daddy/P. Diddy” Combs.
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