The documentary’s greatest strength might be the seriousness with which it approaches the drug trade in Brooklyn in the early Nineties. At one point, Harrison describes Biggie’s unique ear for rhyme, comparing his cadence to jazz drums before we cut to footage of a young Biggie rapping to a solo by the legendary drummer Max Roach. We hear from the jazz musician Donald Harrison, who lived on Biggie’s block and, recognizing a natural talent, took it upon himself to expose his neighbor to the arts at an early age. We’re made privy to the family he had in Jamaica, who were central in his musical development. It spends almost no time on his most iconic moments, opting instead to offer screentime to the more humanizing elements of his life. What the film achieves instead is filling in the gaps between Biggie’s early life in Brooklyn and his days of superstardom.
Many of the sentiments shared in Biggie have been hashed out in various TV specials and movies, and the talking heads are familiar to anyone versed in Nineties hip-hop: We see Sean “Diddy” Combs delivering somber remembrances of his close friend, as well as Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, describing the moment she received the news of her son’s death.
RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart Homeĭirected by Emmett Malloy, whose past credits include a White Stripes documentary and numerous music videos, this film is not likely to illuminate any truly new information about the career of the rapper born Christopher Wallace. Throughout Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, Butler’s trusty camcorder offers a much-needed corrective. The flattened narrative of East Coast versus West Coast rap has served, mostly, to obscure the man Biggie was. Biggie’s story is one that’s been told, retold, and repackaged as a part of our cultural imagination, a straight line from “Big Poppa” to beefing with Tupac to his eventual murder in 1997.
By now, grainy archival footage is a hallmark of the growing genre of music documentary, but here it serves a more imperative function. The resulting footage is electric - a preserved vision of a hip-hop golden era, shown from the vantage point of one of its most culturally influential stars. Early on in the documentary, his longtime friend Damion “D-Roc” Butler explains how Biggie instructed him to capture the audiences at their concerts. The late New York MC, who is the subject of a new Netflix documentary titled Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, was an eager evangelist of the humble camcorder.
Tinsley leans heavily on existing documentaries, previously published interviews, and biographies, particularly Cheo Hodari Coker’s 2003 book “Unbelievable” and the 2005 memoir by Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace.One wonders what Notorious B.I.G would have thought about smartphones. member Chico del Vec and popular Brooklyn DJ Mister Cee, who was among the first to support Biggie’s nascent rap career. “It Was All a Dream,” however, struggles to distinguish itself from earlier accounts - despite personal interviews with consequential figures from Biggie’s life, such as former Junior M.A.F.I.A. A young writer with extensive knowledge of sports and Black culture, Tinsley has established himself as a critical thinker on contemporary issues and a stalwart student of Black American history, one recognized for his original voice and sharp-edged evaluation. Tinsley, a senior reporter with ESPN’s The Undefeated online platform (recently rebranded as Andscape), has covered the intersection of music, sports and race for nearly a decade, applying a journalist’s reportage and analysis to a hip-hop head’s passion.