“The first five to 10 seconds of it was all really all I needed to hear,” Matteo Capoluongo, founder of the Source magazine, says of his first listen to a Notorious B.I.G. demo tape in Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell, the new Netflix documentary about the late Brooklyn rapper. “I heard it, I was like, what the f***?” recalls Sean Combs, the rapper-turned-businessman who was a talent director at Uptown Records when he heard the then-unknown Christopher Wallace for the first time. “I was like, thank you, God.” We know Capoluongo and Combs are not exaggerating. The experience of listening to the Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, hasn’t softened over the last 28 years.
If he had merely recited names from the phone book, Biggie’s delivery would have made him an innovator. His baritone flow was shot with an ineffable sense of gravity, balancing menace and joy as it ripped through invisible pockets of melody hidden in every beat and every syllable. He could turn individual words into eternal catchphrases — no one else had ever pronounced the word “baby” quite like Smalls, and no one ever will. But the self-declared “rap Alfred Hitchcock” was also a narrative visionary, a showrunner for a vast human pageant that could place listeners at the scene of a murder or a stickup or plunge them deep within the mind of a young man overwhelmed at the possibility of the world around him. An assassin felled the 24-year-old Biggie during a 1997 trip to Los Angeles, freezing him in place as hip-hop’s greatest martyr and leaving his memory vulnerable to the revisions and abuses of the lesser lights who outlived him.
I Got A Story to Tell is produced by Wayne Barrow, Smalls’s estate manager, and partly justifies its existence through its use of never-before-seen footage taken during a mid-1990s tour. The film explores the icon’s early life with admirable thoroughness. It’s one thing to get to meet Smalls’s mother, a hardworking and often strict Jamaican immigrant who sent her only child to Catholic school and tried, unsuccessfully, to keep him away from the crack dealers who worked the end of their Brooklyn block. It’s another to meet the man who connected Biggie to the crack trade or the surviving girlfriend of his former best friend and crack-selling lieutenant, who was killed in a Brownsville shootout in the early 1990s.
Those wondering at the origins of Biggie’s unique sound will delight at the range of possible answers. Donald Harrison, an accomplished jazz sideman who lived on the future rapper’s block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, recalls mentoring the young Wallace and likens Biggie’s flow to the jaggedly melodic drum solos of Max Roach. On trips to visit family in Jamaica, Wallace went to parties where DJs would talk-sing over repeating dub beats — some of his uniqueness sprang from being the child of an immigrant.
More interestingly, the documentary implies a Freudian angle to Biggie’s work. Biggie evinced nothing but hostility for the father he never met, but his love for his mother was undeniable. Similar to much else in Biggie’s life and art, this devotion became an entry point into inner turmoil and guilt. “F*** my girl, f*** mom and the world/My life is played out like a Jheri curl,” Smalls rapped on the title track of Ready to Die, his monumental 1994 debut. “Back in the days our parents used to take care of us/Look at ‘em now, they even f***in’ scared of us,” he acknowledged on “Things Done Changed.”
Biggie’s teenage gravitation toward drug dealing could be understood as part of a peripatetic search for someone to replace his absent father, which he found in Harrison, followed by various crack moguls, followed by assorted DJs, followed by Combs. It’s in this final phase that I Got A Story to Tell loses the propulsion of the Kunstlerroman and begins to lapse into myth-making, or maybe myth-defense.
Combs, now known as P. Diddy, appears on screen in a tastefully somber silky black button-up shirt. Hip-hop probably had a role in killing Biggie, but it made Diddy extraordinarily wealthy: He’s now worth an estimated $855 million. Biggie’s 1997 murder, similar to Tupac Shakur’s the year before, alerted everyone to the dangerous relationship between rap and organized crime, thus hastening hip-hop’s transformation from an alluringly criminal-adjacent subculture to a highly lucrative sector of the mainstream entertainment-industrial complex.
The tension between rap as outlaw music and rap as one of modern America’s most commercially successful cultural products still isn’t resolved and is, in fact, getting harder to avoid. Pop Smoke, himself a groundbreaking Brooklynite, was murdered in Los Angeles in early 2020, at the age of 20. King Von, Nipsey Hussle, Bris, and XXXTentacion are other consequential young artists killed in recent years. But what would a nondysfunctional, nonexploitative relationship between the streets and the boardroom even look like? Where is the proper line between art and reality in hip-hop — or in general?
I Got A Story to Tell didn’t have to answer any of these questions in its brisk 97 minutes, but it didn’t have to avoid them conspicuously either. Combs congratulates himself on making a legend’s career but spends almost no time reflecting on what Biggie’s absence might mean, beyond it being tragic. This is typical of the movie, which dispenses with Shakur’s complicated relationship with Biggie and the deadly east-west rap war in the space of about 90 seconds. The movie never even touches the possibility that Biggie or his associates might have had some more-than-passive role in the intercoastal beef, though the reality is more complicated.
Remarkably, the name of Suge Knight, the era-defining crime lord-cum-Death Row Records CEO who has been credibly accused of having some role in Biggie’s death, appears in a label in a photograph but is never actually spoken aloud. Biggie’s “Who Shot Ya?” is a career highlight that sums up everything edgy and brilliant about its creator, but this masterpiece comes in for no real examination, perhaps because of a still lingering controversy over whether it was intended as a dig at Shakur, who had been shot in New York not long before it was recorded. Smalls’s murder is still unsolved, and no one in the movie — not his mother, not former members of his street crew or his entourage, not even the confidante sitting behind him when gunshots ripped through Biggie’s Suburban — discusses a potential culprit or the current state of the search for his killer.
It should be possible to explore the broader implications of Biggie’s life and death without resorting to preachiness or tainting the legend’s image. But the movie doesn’t even try, and complexity and narrative coherence are lost. Many of the same forces that made Biggie a cultural giant, and that enriched a shrewd artistic mediocrity like Combs, might have contributed to Smalls’s murder. That’s fertile ground for any filmmaker, but working it requires risks that director Emmett Malloy and the Smalls estate just wouldn’t take. Crucial aspects of Biggie’s life and afterlife are sanitized, but at least the man himself sensed the dark ironies in his story: “I spit phrases that’ll thrill you/You’re nobody till somebody kills you,” he rapped shortly before his death.
Still, the biggest mysteries about Biggie are ones that can only be posed, not solved. The film introduces them from its opening sequence, in which we see Smalls lounging backstage before a raucous sold-out show. In this scene, and in nearly every archival interview, Smalls speaks in a whispered slur, his eyes drooping, his entire being the total opposite of the hard-spitting human blitz he became behind a microphone. When Biggie rapped, some other spirit animated him, a force only he possessed. Where did it all come from? Why couldn’t it last? And at this point, 24 years after his murder, would any answer be satisfying?
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
