Biggie at the 1996 Soul Train Awards

The simulation waits patiently to materialize in a body or song (what I cannot say, I can sing) and the inevitability of this blurring of lyricism and confession in coherent physical form is our proof that God exists as the chances that anything we are brave enough to imagine, we create. Rappers learn to imagine in code like war heroes and sample from the whole history of black imagining. Take a chance on love. Chances, you are my chances, Bob Marley sings, one of the best lines in music. Biggie sings of chances less wistfully, as if he’s a vicious judiciary or already wounded by his innermost wishes. He also complains about being denied chances by matriarchs throughout his lyrics and skits the mother figure recurs, refusing him love and material security. He’s robbing people because the mother won’t give him money. He wonders if she’ll mourn his impending homicide or curse him in the afterlife. There’s this telling handful of lyrics about mothers denying sons, but no mention of fathers. The foil for this perceived maternal neglect in the broken inventory of the music, is death wishes, suicide ideation, alienation that becomes aggression, an addiction to crime stemming from the need to be punished. 

Biggie’s final live syndicated television performance was as emcee at his own funeral, choreographed premonition live at The Ghetto, The 1996 Soul Train Awards in Los Angeles. A year later he was shot and killed on Wilshire and Fairfax, in the petit district the city calls Miracle Mile, after leaving a nearby Vibe Magazine party. He was in Los Angeles to promote his soon to be released album and in retrospect his death seems like a planned part of the PR. His cadaver stretched out and shared as sacrament between social obligations or a servant’s sneer behind the backs of his smug employers. It’s as if he spent his final days brilliantly warning the forces that killed him of their own impending sin, just by being present, daring them to cannibalize him. 

For this performance that kicks off his final year on earth, he quotes the “Gin House Blues” in quiet echo, help me cause I’m in my sin, then descends into the den of it, onto the Soul Train stage in a cage-like coffin-like contraption with sadness halved by vengeance blurting from his eyes, a hushed head nod, and the line you’re nobody till somebody kills you strapped to his skin and numinous, moonlit or doom-lit. So macabre as to be a gospel as suicide note, a phantom surrender to alert his saboteurs he was onto them, didn’t even care. Some acts of violence become urban legends before they can be investigated. Emotionalism suspends the crime in disbelief and follows the money to the thief, to the one who orchestrates the tragedies to stack like billfolds between tour dates. Does the spectacle of ritual sacrifice create Christ consciousness or is this just another black martyr to stay the Nation Time beast threatening to charge. It’s said that Biggie wanted to start his own label and leave the famous and perhaps counterfeit East Coast/ West Coast beef behind, abandon his handlers at Big Boy, escape the sycophantic delusions of “Puff Daddy,” and be glad. In his final televised interview, filmed a couple of weeks before his death for Rap City, he announced his forthcoming album Life After Death, looking as regal as a king on a fold out chair at a concrete playground. He discusses himself and recently assassinated West Coast rival Tupac as a unit in the past tense: I realized how powerful me and Pac were. And we go from spectators at a show to uninvited guests at a double funeral that is still ongoing. Maybe Biggie helped teach a generation how to let go of grievances and just grieve.