Biggie Envy and the Gangsta Sublime

Abstract

The beautiful murder, the murder lifted into the mind by winged words, is in many ways the heartbeat of American culture-indeed, of all western culture. In the Iliad, for instance, Achilles kills Priam's son Lykaon after delivering a memorable speech on the nature of mortality to the pleading prince. Centuries later, lynchings of African Americans were enabled by disquisitions on the dangers they posed to white power and white honor, whose greatest symbol was the white woman. Eloquent Cold War speeches helped justify CIA rubouts and Western sponsorship of greedy and sometimes homicidal non-Western dictators (including Saddam Hussein). The movie Patton, based on the life of the American general, brings to the screen the eloquence that fills the hearts of soldiers as they march into battle. In the famous opening scene, Patton advises his men not to die for their country but to make the other poor son of a bitch die for his country. Hardcore rappers rhyming about blowing away their foes with 9-millimeter pistols are in a sense part of a grand and troubling tradition. A memorable example was the late Christopher Wallace when he put on the persona of The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls, aka Big Poppa). Like other so-called gangsta rappers, Wallace seemed to follow the advice of the grandfather in Invisible Man, to agree [the white power structure] to death and destruction. Rapping such lines as I been robbing motherfuckers since the slave ships, Wallace let himself be swallowed up on disc in a persona his sharp ironies cut open-a persona perfected for black males of his approximate class and generation in New York City at the beginning of the 1990s.1