“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.