The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E13

Book World

BY SANTI ELIJAH HOLLEY

H

ip-hop has a fondness for venerating its heroes, es- pecially those who die at the peak of their talent and influence. While some of these artists have only recently been given the biographical treat- ment — books on the late J Dilla, DJ Screw and Nipsey Hussle have been published in the last couple of years — others have been ex- haustively documented, studied, debated and investigated, until it feels like nothing new about them can possibly be learned. With his book on the Notorious B.I.G., “It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World that Made Him,” author Justin Tinsley takes on the formidable challenge of telling the story of one of the most gifted, legendary and iconic rappers to ever hold a mic — and one who has, since his death a qua- rter-century ago, been the subject of at least seven books, one biopic, myriad podcasts and two documentaries, most recently the 2021 Netflix film, “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell.” In the introduction to his book, Tinsley confesses that he was apprehensive when he was first approached to write a biogra- phy of one of the most biographed rappers. “What the hell could I say about the Notorious B.I.G. that hadn’t already been said?” Tinsley re- calls asking himself. “That people were willing to speak about?” Not much, it turns out. Anyone who considers himself or herself a fan of Biggie’s music must have some familiarity with his story. Born Christopher Wal- lace in Brooklyn and raised by a single mother, Biggie dropped out of high school to become a full- time hustler, peddling crack cocaine on street corners and occa- sionally getting into trouble with the law. He was on his way to becoming yet another anony- mous statistic, when he was dis- covered, almost by accident, to possess an extraordinary gift of lyricism and storytelling. He rocketed to hip-hop superstar- dom, dropping hit after hit, and was days away from releasing his highly anticipated sophomore album when he was killed, at age 24, during a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in March 1997. Published to coincide with what would’ve been Biggie’s 50th birthday, “It Was All a Dream” could’ve been an opportunity to reflect anew on his brief life and unparalleled talent, or to examine how his music is relevant to our current conversations on race and entertainment. Regrettably, readers looking for new insights or original appraisals will be dis- appointed. Tinsley, a senior reporter with ESPN’s the Undefeated online platform (recently rebranded as Andscape), has covered the inter- section of music, sports and race for nearly a decade, applying a journalist’s reportage and analy- sis to a hip-hop head’s passion. A young writer with extensive knowledge of sports and Black culture, Tinsley has established himself as a critical thinker on contemporary issues and a stal- wart student of Black American history, one recognized for his original voice and sharp-edged evaluation. “It Was All a Dream,” however, struggles to distinguish itself from earlier accounts — de- spite personal interviews with consequential figures from Big- gie’s life, such as former Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Chico del Vec

and popular Brooklyn DJ Mister Cee, who was among the first to support Biggie’s nascent rap career. Tinsley leans heavily on ex- isting documentaries, previously published interviews, and biogra- phies, particularly Cheo Hodari Coker’s 2003 book “Unbelievable” and the 2005 memoir by Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace. Where “It Was All a Dream” seeks to set itself apart can be found in its subtitle: “Biggie and the World that Made Him.” Tins- ley broadens his scope to observe what the country was going through while Biggie was grow- ing up — the crack epidemic, a precipitous rise in violent crime, Reaganomics — and how these developments affected Black ur- ban communities, most acutely in New York. “Between 1980 and 1989, New York City averaged 2,042 homi- cides a year, peaking in 1990 with 2,605,” Tinsley writes. “What drugs did to New York was vi- cious. Street corners became makeshift offices for countless young Black men who saw money in the street as a better play than flipping burgers at McDonald’s or working at a laundromat.” Tinsley deftly notes how the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs became a war on lower-in- come Black families and how, for young Black men without viable employment opportunities, hustling was often the only way to put food on the table and a roof over their families’ heads. It has long been a matter of debate whether the federal government deliber- ately funneled cocaine from Latin

America into Black communities or merely turned a blind eye to what was happening. But what is beyond dispute is that the government responded to the rise in drug use and violent crime with draconian measures of repres- sion and mass incarceration. It’s not quite clear, however, if the young Christopher Wallace was particularly affected or moti- vated by these social ills and anxi- eties. While far from prosperous, his mother, Voletta, a Jamaican immigrant, was a college-educat- ed preschool teacher who loved and doted on her only son. His interest in hustling was motivat- ed less by survival and more by the most archetypal American justification: There’s money to be made, so why shouldn’t I make it? Biggie’s nonchalance, often coming across as ambivalence, follows him into his next occupa- tion, rap star, as he routinely delegates artistic decisions to others, first Mister Cee and then Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs — record producer, creative director, song- writer, executive, visionary — whose tireless (also arrogant and hostile) work ethic was funda- mental in turning the little- known street hustler from Bed- ford-Stuyvesant into a worldwide superstar. Soft-spoken and diffident, Big- gie gets lost within the pages of “It Was All a Dream,” upstaged by more purpose-driven or brassier peers, including fellow rapper and early career mentor Tupac Shakur. Biggie’s fate will forever be linked to Shakur’s, whose death by drive-by shooting six

months earlier is widely seen as the catalyst for the retaliatory killing of Biggie. Shakur’s and Biggie’s murders marked the ugli- est chapter in hip-hop history and the loss of two of its biggest talents. It was a moment of intense soul-searching for the culture in general, but for Brooklyn, to lose Biggie was to lose of one of its brightest stars, whose unlikely ascendancy had been an inspira- tion to the blighted borough. “A piece of Brooklyn’s soul, a piece of its very identity, had been snatched away,” Tinsley writes. “Big, a first-generation American kid, was Brooklyn. The borough was responsible for so much in hip-hop culture, and Big repre- sented so much of that in one body. One massive, beautiful body that bucked at normal standards for what beauty could look like artistically and spiritually. Throughout his career, the one thing that remained true always was the space he made in his soul for Brooklyn.” The Notorious B.I.G. will always have a place in conversations about hip-hop. His music will continue to bring down clubs and house parties, and he will be reliably named in “top five” best rapper lists. Nevertheless, as “It Was All a Dream” reminds us, even the most massive and most beautiful talents must someday be laid to rest.

Santi Elijah Holley is a journalist, essayist and the author of “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads” and the forthcoming “An Amerikan Family.”

Putting Biggie’s

talent in

perspective

RAYMOND BOYD/GETTY IMAGES Biggie performs at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago in September 1994, the month he released his debut studio album, “Ready to Die.”

BY JOAN FRANK

I

t took novelist Brian Morton decades to realize that he didn’t always have to say yes to his mother. “It can take the better part of a lifetime to learn that you don’t actually always have to be so damn good.” Wel- come to “Tasha: A Son’s Memoir,” Morton’s bracing account of his late mother’s final years. Morton’s novels — including the beautiful “Starting Out in the Evening,” which became an equally fine film starring Frank Langella — all have in common a calm, caring voice that imbues the prose with a wry, pained tenderness, as if shaking its head at the human folly it describes. That same voice sustains this memoir, opening with the startling image of Morton’s 85-year- old mother’s car slowly filling with water, stalled in a terrible rainstorm en route to a grand- daughter’s dance recital. Dramatically, Morton cuts to an early memory of himself, age 4, and his sister, 7, watching his mother jump from a moving train — luckily, not hurt too badly. It’s a useful reference. Morton had known that his mother was hellbent on driving to the recital, storm or no. But, he writes, “I’d learned long ago that when I tried to talk her out of doing something she was intent on, I

had no chance.” This stalemate defines the grown son’s lifelong predicament. Stakes now, however, have soared: The storm event causes his mother to have a stroke, which precipitates a steady decline that she denies almost every step of the way. Morton’s burden looms: “I had successfully kept her at arm’s length for many years ... and this was comfortable for me.” That distance, he knew, was about to change. “I might have to call on different capacities in myself, and I didn’t want to.” Checking her into a rehab hos- pital, he’s touchingly hopeful: “Everything that can be fixed, we’ll help her fix. ... The small stroke could be a turning point.” Alas, Tasha refuses “the audiol- ogist, the urologist, and the shrink, and although she keeps going to physical therapy, she won’t take it seriously.” She won’t let Morton remove a single swiz- zle stick from her junk-laden, cat-feces-and-dead-mice-riddled house. Morton must take her driver’s license. She stops chang- ing her clothes; her senior center peers complain. (She remains “almost feral in her refusal to even look at us. ... My mother’s mind was alien to me now.”) Alternate- ly furious with or covetous of Morton’s care, she can still some- times bristle with logic, as when arguing with a nurse about God’s existence: “So [life’s atrocities

are] like a TV show to [God]? A TV show that he doesn’t really like but he doesn’t turn off?” At that, Morton can’t suppress his pride, nor his laughter. “How can you see your parents clearly?” Morton wonders. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to, but to his extreme credit, he gives it everything, passionately chroni- cling his mother’s knotty past — daughter, wife, widow, mother, teacher, union activist — inter- leaved with his own present ex- haustion, exasperation and an- guish (at one point Tasha wan- ders down the highway on foot in the middle of the night). Caregivers for elderly parents may be stunned — also slightly relieved — to recognize various elements: desperate research, trial after trial (some, involving abusive caregivers, go shockingly wrong) and rage chased by guilt. Then there are the hopeless ef- forts to persuade the afflicted elder to consider assisted living and the grim realities in many such facilities. Morton observes: “ ‘Being Mor- tal’ [by surgeon/author Atul Gawande] is a book about how we treat the old. A book like this ... will make you aware of the very few places where things are done right, which always turn out to be too far away to be of help to you.” And: “When you’re taking care of an elderly parent, life is filled with ... situations that make

what-ifs inevitable ... in which you have to decide how much you should demand and how little you can settle for.” Truth: I found “Tasha” addic- tive. I couldn’t even slow down. Why? Its startling details, fear- less depictions and the curiosity these things spark: How might Morton “solve” the unsolvable? Best is Morton’s witty, scalding honesty — noting his fear, when a phrase suddenly eludes him, “of my own dementia to come.” “I love you,” he tells Tasha at one (typically) hapless moment. “I always knew that,” she re- plies. “But it doesn’t help.” A complex, arduous yet satisfy- ing reckoning seeps through. Morton finds his mother’s diary, and he discloses passages that let us better understand her loneli- ness, occasional resentment of her grown children and helpless- ness in the face of waning energy. “People grow tired. She grew tired.” Morton also honors his parents’ better selves, their en- couraging his choices to write and teach. “Tasha” stands as both a cri de coeur and vibrant testa- ment — the painstaking, brave, generous piecing-together of a wildly difficult puzzle.

Joan Frank ’s newest novel is “The Outlook for Earthlings.” Concurrent works are “Where You’re All Going: Four Novellas” and “Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place.”

For a caregiving son,

a t rying, hopelessly

l oving relationship

TASHA A Son’s Memoir By Brian Morton A vid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. 208 pp. $28

DAVID KUMIN A uthor Brian Morton writes with witty, scalding honesty.

IT WAS ALL A DREAM Biggie and the World That Made Him By Justin Tinsley Abrams. 420 pp. $28

DANIELLA BALTIMORE Justin Tinsley applies his journalistic skills to the book.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

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