It's Valentine's Day today, and starting since about the time I walked from my car to work this morning, "Big Poppa" has been on-and-off stuck in my head today. I'm not sure why that is.
When Notorious BIG died in 1997, I can't say that I was a fan. It wasn't that I was actively against him; I just didn't really have any feelings towards him or his music. Much in the same way with Tupac Shakur (who preceded Biggie in death by about six months and is inexorably linked to him because of the identical ways they left this planet), I was shocked by the murder but not outwardly affected. I knew of him, of course, but it would take Puff Daddy (as he was known back then) to make Biggie's legacy apparent to me...by sampling the Police and putting out his own requiem for a friend.
"Big Poppa" really didn't come into my life until I caught a basic-cable screening of the Keanu Reeves vehicle Hard Ball, from 2001. You may be familiar with Reeves' constant ability to get work in big pictures even though he has the charisma of a wet piece of cardboard, but he's surprisingly good when you lower your expectations, and Hard Ball worked for me. I could believe that he was a white gambler who, in order to pay off some very bad men, took a job as coach for an inner-city baseball team of youngsters and learn something about himself in the process. Also, it was a slow afternoon, so I gave it a shot. All in all, I'd recommend it.
The pitcher for the team, a young kid with a fastball, only has confidence when he's got his headphones on and blasting Biggie's iconic song, the one he's probably most known for amongst non-rap fans. At first, I wondered about a kid that age listening to a profanity-laced track like "Big Poppa," but then I remembered that he lives in the projects of Chicago, where profanity is the least of his worries. I grew up in the rural area where Deliverance was filmed, so I can't speak to inner-city problems that I've never experienced (though I will say you don't want to be roaming the streets of Walhalla after seven...because everything but the gas stations is closed). As it turns out, gang violence inevitably spills over onto the team, and in a way that, as a casual viewer, had me close to weeping like a baby. Spoiler alert: the most adorable of the young teammates meets a tragic end.
So I went back to "Big Poppa," eventually getting it off iTunes, and it's something that I respond to far more than I'd have thought when it first came out. I can kinda see now, considering Biggie's personal history as a drug dealer who wanted to escape the very violence he chronicled and perhaps contributed to, that this "party anthem" is a desire for a life that is more than what he's known, and that the "grams I had to measure" represented the only way out for a long time. Guess what, kids? Not a lot of opportunities for inner-city youth that don't involve selling drugs or acting hard whenever someone from another neighborhood encroaches on your territory. Or so I've learned from rap songs and movies about the inner-city; I spent two days in New York in 1997, three in New Orleans last year, and I've been to Washington, DC twice during the Clinton adminstration. My experience sans art about the inner city is limited.
But the point I'd like to make (and I had one when I started, at least) is that, in the song, Biggie is trying to do something we'd all like to do this Valentine's day: get it on with a lovely lady. In that sense, there's nothing original there (personally, I leave it to the masters when I want "get it on" music: Marvin Gaye and Al Green). But there's a swagger that, while inherited from soul and the machismo of pre-feminism rock music, is made all Biggie's own. He's a smooth operator, saying all the things that the lady wants to hear, but he's also up-front that basically what he's looking for is a blow-job, more or less. If he weren't a big man (less a teddy bear than a grizzly at rest), it wouldn't work, or perhaps it would work too well (who can honestly listen to Chris Brown talk sweet nothings after his fists ran into Rihanna's face?). But laid down with a seductive groove, this paen to the material desires of the hip-hop entrepeneur (carnal and otherwise) is pretty damn good.
I think I've said it before, but a lot of the hip-hop that I respond to is from my past, the stuff that first broke the rap thing open in the late Eighties and early Nineties. I can enjoy songs from later on and even current songs (that one about the guy shopping at the thrift store? Priceless), but my love for the hip-hop I grew up with seems to be the winner. But I would throw "Big Poppa" up against any other song anyone else could suggest as something awesome that rewards multiple listens. Because no one else could pull off the following line: "If you got a gun up in your waist, please don't shoot up this place/Why?/'Cause I see some ladies tonight that should be having my baby, baby."
Poetry...
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