Yesterday I was in a school. In a class of 13 year olds. More on that later. One boy kept repeating the chorus 'Notorious' from the Duran Duran record of 1986. What's that all about I thought briefly. Has the 80s revival gone so in depth that even the most banal of Duran's singles are now common currency? Then I remembered seeing the film poster for 'Notorious', the new biopic of Biggie Smalls / Notorious BIG, and everything fell into place. Just as another 13 year old took up the refrain.
On Sunday mornings in the mid-90s I would get up at 6am - which was very early for me to rise, back then when I had a social life and always went out on Saturday nights. I'd get the tube to Holborn and walk to Leather Lane, to the record shop I worked at. On Sundays we'd run a stall at East Street market off the Walworth Road in south east London, so I'd load up the transit van with thousands of CDs, blank tapes & VHS and off we'd trundle through the City. London's financial heart was dead at this time of the week and I loved speeding through it, looking at the architecture, doing my own version of the black cab drivers' Knowledge, working out how the various streets met up together.
We'd get there to set up at 7.30am and we'd have a completely different clientele to that of the store - probably 90% black - lots of Africans & Caribbeans. There were loads of albums that we'd sell in the hundreds - back then when folk still bought CDs: Buju Banton 'Til Shiloh', Blackstreet 'Another Level', Destiny's Child 'Writings on the Wall', D'Angelo 'Brown Sugar', 2Pac 'Me Against The World', Mary J Blige 'My Life' are a few examples that maybe didn't have a lot of mainstream profile at that time but that we'd sell 10-25 of every single week for a year. For me it was an introduction into modern R&B and reggae, and it was great. Notorious BIG's 'Ready To Die' was another such album. Biggie's mic skills are just fantastic, his flow was wonderful, great rhymes. With a hint of (but not too much) pop sheen added by the then Sean 'Puffy' Combs. Sometimes the subject matter could get to me - he was after all a violent, drug pushing, lucre-driven (maybe) misogynist. But I could still rationalise that as there were some amazing tracks on the album. Here's my favourite:
Notorious BIG 'Juicy'Listening to Radio 1 driving home today there was a review of the movie on Edith Bowman's show. It wasn't a great review and comment was made on what a nasty piece of work Biggie was personally. And then they played 'Mo' Money Mo' Problems' and I could forgive him everything.
I just love this track. Driven by a sample from Diana Ross's classic 'I'm Coming Out' (produced by Chic's Nile Rogers & Bernard Edwards - which remind me I need to get that 'Diana' album) it's just pop perfection. That said, coming from someone undergoing a period of unemployment I can categorically state that the premise of the title is FACTUALLY INCORRECT. Personally I'm finding that problems tend to increase exponentially as revenue entering the home decreases. But that's just my personal maths, I'm not a platinum selling hip hop star. And I'm alive. Anyway it still does the business for me - I had the window wound down, radio blasting like an ASBO kid in his Clio twin turbo. Unfortunately I only have the clean edit.
Buy Notorious BIG music at Amazon
Here's a few other tracks that remind me of that era
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