By TOURE;
Published: December 18, 1994
STANDING ON THE CORNER OF 125th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem at 3 A.M. one recent Sunday, the 6-foot-3, 280-pound rapper Biggie Smalls appeared not so much large but larger than life.
Moments before, he had finished the third of three sold-out concerts at the Apollo Theater and, wearing the same brown leather Army jacket and pants and beige Kangol cap he had worn on stage, he then slipped out the back door of the theater. At the corner, he relaxed in the middle of a circle of friends but soon heard his own voice booming back at him from the radios of cars as they stopped at or cruised slowly through the intersection. As the rapper surveyed the scene, he found himself being inadvertently saluted by his own song "Big Papa."
Such a moment isn't an unlikely occurrence in Harlem or any place where hip-hop fans are in abundance. With both his debut album, "Ready to Die," and the single "Juicy" having gone gold, the 20-year-old rapper, who is known professionally as the Notorious B.I.G. and to his mother as Chris Wallace, is the rapper of the moment.
In a realm where the demand for newness is a constant, it's little surprise that despite releases by veterans like Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg, Public Enemy and Arrested Development, nearly all the most acclaimed albums this year have come from newcomers: Nas, Method Man and Keith Murray.
Biggie Smalls is not the best vocalist of the group, but he stands out because his lyrics mix autobiographical details about crime and violence with emotional honesty, telling how he felt while making a living as a drug dealer.
The evening after the Apollo show, he sat on the stairs outside the third-floor apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn where he still lives with his mother, Voletta Wallace, and talked about his life. "I used to sell crack," he said. "My customers were ringing my bell, and they would come up on the steps and smoke right here. They knew where I lived; they knew my moms."
He says he began dealing around the age of 12, working the area on Fulton Street between St. James Place and Washington Avenue while his mother taught preschool children during the day and attended school at night. (She says she only learned of her only child's drug dealing recently. "I found out about my son and his little antics through his music and through magazines," she said. "I read this thing and said, 'Huh? I never knew.' ")
As a 17-year-old high school dropout, the rapper says he was arrested for selling crack and spent nine months in a North Carolina jail before making bail. His case is still pending. He fell into a career in rap music when a tape he had recorded for fun was brought to the attention of Andre Harrell, president of Uptown Entertainment, a New York record label that specializes in hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues.
"He had a voice that just sounded like it was heavy, funky and rhythmic," Mr. Harrell recalled. "And it had a lot of personality -- like a light on his feet kind of big brother." He signed the rapper but dropped him after Sean (Puffy) Combs, the young assistant who had first heard the tape, left Uptown to start his own label, Bad Boy Entertainment. Mr. Combs then made Biggie Smalls's album one of his first releases.
With the success of "Ready to Die," the rapper has put drug dealing behind him but retains the dealer's constant fear that his life is in danger. "One thing I learned about the game is when you get a lot of money, niggers don't like you," he said. "I'm getting more money now."
Every time the front door of the apartment building opened, he leaped up to see who was climbing the stairs. On this day, there were a pair of black 9-millimeter Rugers under the mattress in his bedroom. "I'm not paranoid to the point where -- " He paused. "Yes, I am. I'm scared to death. Scared of getting my brains blown out."
His fear is hardly unjustified. Last month alone, two rappers -- Tupac Shakur and a member of the Wu-Tang Clan -- were shot in what the police described as robbery attempts. Still, Biggie Smalls doesn't let fear dominate him as his Apollo performance and its aftermath attest. "I got to see what's going down, where the party's at," he said. "I can't live my life in no bubble."
THOUGH MANY RAPPERS exaggerate about the lives they led before becoming performers, some are actually former drug dealers. Few have ever been as open in detailing their criminal past as Biggie Smalls, and none have ever been as clear about the pain they felt at the time. "He doesn't want anyone to see that he's not as tough as he thinks he is," said Ms. Wallace, the rapper's mother. "He cries inside. He bleeds inside. But he doesn't want anyone to see the vulnerable side of him."
"Ready to Die" is, indeed, marked by pathos unusual not only in hip-hop but in pop music. "In street life you're not allowed to show if you care about something," said Mr. Combs, of Bad Boy Entertainment. "You've got to keep that straight face. The flip side of that is his album. He's giving up all his vulnerability. He's letting you know how he has felt about his mother. He's letting you know how he cried. How he has thought about killing himself."
Though drug dealing carries tremendous heroic value with some young urban dwellers, he sacrifices the figure's romantic potential. His raps acknowlege both the excitement of drug dealing and the stress caused by the threat from other dealers, robbers, the police and parents, sometimes one's own. In presenting the downside of that life, "Ready to Die" offers perhaps the most balanced and honest portrait of the dealer's life of any in hip-hop. "He's trying to enlighten people to the way your mind thinks when you're broke, when you're young growing up and not feeling like nobody cares about you," Mr. Combs said.
On "Everyday Struggle," for example, Biggie Smalls rhymes: "I know how it feel to wake up . . . / Pocket broke as hell/ Another rock to sell/ People look at you like you's the user/ Selling drugs to all the losers/ Mad Buddah 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."
By expressing the self-loathing and self-doubt he felt while dealing, he hopes that his experiences may resonate with other living that life. "I want them stressed-out niggers to be, like, 'Yo, this nigger be hitting it right on the nose, man,' "he said. "That's what I'm trying to do." And he added, venting those feelings was also therapeutic. "I got a lot off my chest with that album."
And he has put a lot in his pocket. Next month he will move his mother from the apartment in which she has lived for 25 years and into a house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. But despite new-found economic independence and the fear he feels while sitting in his own home, he is reluctant to move.
"I could never see myself moving in the suburbs," he said. "It ain't going to be right, and the lyrics are going to be soundin' nasty. I know it. There won't be nothing to rap about except the birds."
Photo: Biggie Smalls in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where he lives -- He hopes that his experiences may resonate with others living on the margins. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times)
Source:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=9E04E7D81F39F93BA25751C1A962958260&pagewanted=1
