Those most interested in the material will already know most of his story, but the new documentary ‘Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell’ dishes out numerous revelations for those who only know the hits and the fact that he was gunned down at the age of 24, about 6 months after his rival and eventual adversary Tupac Shakur met the same fate.
What this doc, directed by Emmet Malloy, has that is “new” is previously unseen camcorder footage shot by childhood friend and later “crew member” Damion Butler while the rapper was on tour in 1995. As Butler puts it, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, then, f**k, what’s a video worth?” The footage is mostly a series of hotel hallways, but Butler is one of many people who grew up in Brooklyn with the kid who was only known as Christopher Wallace in his pre-fame days, and his contributions as an interview subject are far more enlightening than the shaky video footage (though there are some good clips within).
One interesting device used is an animated road map that shows where in Brooklyn these guys lived in relation to each other and, tellingly, in relation to Fulton Avenue, the street where many of them became drug dealers, including Biggie.
That part of his bio is well-known, if always overstated, but one of the discoveries for me was that Biggie went to Catholic school, had a caring mother who was employed and spent a lot of time looking out the window down at the stoop to make sure that Christopher wasn’t getting into trouble. It was during her working hours of 9 to 5 that Biggie was on his hustle.
P. Diddy, a producer on the film and, of course, the impresario who signed Notorious B.I.G. to Bad Boy Records,offers soundbites that feel rehearsed (only because he has said all of this a million times before), but a revelation for me was that Jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison lived next door and served as a kind of mentor. Harrison breaks down Biggie’s cadence and rhythm by comparing it to a jazz drummer – a brief scene with Biggie’s rapping synced up to the great Max Roach’s drumming proves Harrison’s point and provides the only well-thought out assessment of the rapper’s talents, the rest of the interviewees are more prone to “he was the greatest.”
I am admittedly someone who only knows (and likes) the most well known songs, and my only other previous source of biographical information was the 2009 film Notorious, so the film was especially interesting to me – even small things like Biggie and his mom liked Country and Western music, or that he had a pretty good set of pipes and might’ve made it as a singer, had Hip-Hop not been his calling.
Biggie: I Got A Story to Tell. Now streaming on Netflix. 3 out of 4 Stars. Reviewed by Kyle Osborne
