Notorious

Back in the Nineties when I heard about the so-called Hip Hop War between the East Coast and the West Coast rappers, I thought it was about the dumbest and most pointless thing I had ever heard. Thanks to Notorious, the new biopic about the Christopher Smalls Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G., I now know that, at least according to the film, the rappers themselves had the same reaction as I did.

My absolute ignorance of hip hop is evident by the fact that I had no idea who the Notorious B.I.G. was. His significance in music history, I learned, was that he was the first "street" artist from Brooklyn to make it in the industry. Sean "Puffy" Combs was very instrumental in his success. He made friends with Tupac Shakur, a west coast rapper, but somehow Shakur went nuts, got involved with thugs, and eventually both Shakur and Smalls wound up dead.

The fact that I learned so much about hip hop history during two hours is a testament to the soundness of the screenplay of this movie. In a lot of ways, this movie could well have been a sequel to Cadillac Records, in that both were highly informative in a historical fashion, and both followed a collection of artists working together in a common studio. The plotline in both follows not only one artist, but charts the rise of several, and of the studio itself.

In many ways this felt like a very old fashioned movie, reminding me not just of the old classical Hollywood movie biopics, but of, say, The Public Enemy (1931). In this latter movie, Cagney is a gangster who is nevertheless a "momma's boy," and his downfall is played for sentimentality, and as a cautionary tale. There is more than a little bit of this flavor in Notorious.

It makes for an interesting hybrid: on the one hand, there is constant profanity, degradation of women (who nevertheless fight back on their own terms), and plenty of dope smoking. On the other hand, the hero (Wallace) is played as a "nice boy" who managed to fall into the wrong crowd.

What the movie didn't do was turn me into a fan of Wallace. I have never been a hip hop fan, and I didn't quite "get" what made his actual rapping so good, although I understood it from the reaction of other characters to him.

One of the strengths of the movie was the "period" aspects of its portrayal of the Nineties. It is good for Hollywood to make many movies about the Nineties while it is still fresh in our minds, and Notorious reminded me a lot of The Wackness from last summer, which is set in Brooklyn in 1994 and overlaps much of the cultural setting of Notorious.

The most potent image in the movie was when I first saw Wallace standing on a Brooklyn street wearing a black down jacket and a black Oakland Raiders stocking cap. I was instantly catapulted back fifteen years, looking at the graffiti on the buildings visible from the Gowanus Freeway. I don't miss those Raiders hats.

Notorious was the second movie I saw at the Cinemaworld in Fitchburg, which is located inside a strip mall. I love movie theaters like that. The tickets were cheap, and the marquee was in a typography from the 1980s. There is something beautiful about the resiliency of such places.