If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls

Introduction

In late fall 1994, Christopher Wallace—with the production support of Sean “Puffy” Combs and Bad Boy Records—released his hugely successful debut rap album, Ready to Die. On the album’s final track, “Suicidal Thoughts,” Wallace’s larger-than-life alter ego, Biggie Smalls (also known in the hip-hop world as the Notorious B.I.G., Frank White, Biggie , or, simply, “Big”), testifies to the undefeatable despair of his life, takes a loaded gun to his head, and carries out the album’s anticipated death fantasy. Wallace’s second album, Life after Death (1997), literally picks up where “Suicidal Thoughts” leaves off, sampling this self-annihilating scene on its first two tracks, “Life after Death Intro” and “Somebody’s Gotta Die.” Yet by returning to this performance of deathly violence as a way to introduce Life after Death, Wallace dramatizes how Biggie’s death on his first album functions not only as a point of finality carrying him to a dark, barren nether world but also as a primal scene initiating Biggie’s deathly rite of passage toward manhood and self-discovery. In this latter regard, Biggie’s symbolic suicide not only works to generate the deathly assortment of new hard-core material on his second album but also, and, I think, more importantly, produces a modern-day black male subject that asserts that to be black, poor, and male is to live with the sense that one is at once bound for and yet strangely emanating out of death.1 To concede, on the one hand, a self-annihilating drive in Biggie’s symbolic suicide and, on the other, to distinguish it as an originary and genIntroduction 2 Introduction erative site of black male subjectivity is, in many ways, to indulge Wallace ’s curious obsession with death; however, his inexhaustible excavation of death’s destructive force as well as its emancipatory potentiality is also to bear witness to what in 1987 musical prodigy Prince would memorialize in song as a “sign o[f] the times,” a sobering commentary on the largescale effects of federal withdrawal from public institutions as well as the paramilitary force of law shaping the lived experiences and artistic imaginings of those relegated to the precarious margins of U.S. society throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To be sure, by 1997 when Wallace was killed, deathly violence saturated the lives of poor urban black male youths, giving altogether new meaning to the problematic and now outdated euphemism “at risk.” Indeed, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Black males [during this period] accounted for 45 percent of all homicide victims, while they only account[ed] for 6 percent of the entire population.” In addition, “firearms ha[d] become the predominant method of suicide for Blacks aged 10–19 years, accounting for over 66 percent of suicides.” Out of this contemporary zeitgeist of state apathy and violence, Biggie’s engrossing lyrical flow “gives life” to the grim realities and dreams of poor urban black men, capturing—on so many of his hardcore tracks—the life-threatening ways “things” had, in fact, “changed” for those growing up amid deindustrialization, the “crack wars,” the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex, the AIDS epidemic, and the militarization of inner-city life. Thus, even while most of Wallace’s mainstream success has been built on commercially minded club hits such as “Juicy,” “Big Poppa,” “One More Chance,” and “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” it is perhaps not surprising that the toxic depictions of deathly violence, the disaffected expectancy of death, and the braggadocious representations of death-defiance make up the leitmotifs of his complete discography. (A sampling of track titles from Wallace’s recordings leaves little room for doubt concerning his untiring fixation on death: “Ready to Die,” “Things Done Changed,” “Warning,” “Who Shot Ya,” “Dead Wrong,” “My Downfall,” “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),” “Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Miss U,” “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” and “Would You Die For Me”). Yet, despite all these deathly stories of contemporary urban black male life, Wallace’s hard-core imagination was not the stuff to which his own lived experiences could attest ; that is, it is widely known that Wallace was never directly implicated in any gang activity, never caught up in gun violence, and only marginally Introduction 3 drawn in by drug dealing; nonetheless, his meteoric success as a...