SPIN
January 1998
by Sia Michel
The Mourning After
By Sia Michel
It's one month after the Notorious B.I.G.'s murder, and the Bad Boy family is still grappling with life after death. On this April afternoon, three generations are camped out in a plush tour bus on a Long Island golf course, where filming for the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video is in full swing. Though an army of extras, honeys-for-hire, and scamming PAs are whooping it up outside, the mood in the bus is decidedly gloomy. Voletta Wallace, B.I.G.'s mother, is reading aloud from a Word Up! obituary. Sean "Puffy" Combs, sick with a bad cold, slouches in a leather chair, getting his groom on (hair oiled, nails buffed) from a burly, bare-chested valet. And T'Yanna Wallace, Biggie's four-year-old daughter, is struggling to write a caption for a drawing of Puffy crying giant midnight-blue tears.
"How do you spell 'kill'?" she asks her grandmother. "K-I-L-L," Mrs. Wallace, a schoolteacher, responds sweetly. Suddenly, as one of Biggie's sex-you-up raps erupts from the stereo, Puffy runs down the length of the bus in his Versace underwear, frantic to turn it off. "There's some curse words on it," he wheezes. "T'Yanna ain't supposed to hear it." But spin control only goes so far. A few minutes later, T'Yanna shyly holds up her picture. It reads: COME KILL US. KILL US PLEASE. DADDY DEAD KILLED BY GUN. For the rest of our interview, Puffy is visibly deflated.
"We were like brothers," Puffy says. "I feel responsible for his memory. I want to make sure that the Biggie no one ever really knew is the one that everyone remembers. There was so much more to him than being hard." Could it be that it was all so simple then? Just six months later, when Puffy, Mrs. Wallace, and the entire Bad Boy crew took the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to accept "Best Rap Video" honors for Biggie's "Hypnotize," the Notorious B.I.G. had been transformed from a shot-dead kid into a sanitized, feel-good memory, a placid face on a black remember T-shirt. Puffy's efforts to memorialize his best friend/highest-profile artist -- and kick off a solo career -- had conflated into a ball-of-confusion best described as marketable mourning.
It used to be that celebrities grieved in private; fans grieved in public. The rise of the tell-all no-repression therapeutic, though, has rewritten that equation. Over the past decade, we've watched Courtney Love chant "asshole" with a parkful of Kurt Cobain devotees, listened to Eric Clapton lament a dead son in the Grammy-winning weeper "Tears in Heaven," scratched our heads as punk shiva Patti Smith released not one, but two albums of elegies for dearly departeds, and wondered why Elton John didn't think Princess Diana deserved more than Marilyn Monroe's sloppy seconds, a.k.a. "Candle in the Wind 1997."
"We've developed a cultural bereavement myth that says we have to air our feelings publicly because repression is inherently bad," says Dr. George Bonanno, a professor of psychology at Catholic University and an expert on cross-cultural grieving. "But I've found that people who express extremely negative feelings about their loss tend to do worse than people who bottle them up."
In the early months of what was to become a yearlong mourning-after (Biggie, Gianni Versace, Diana), Puffy and his cohorts launched a relentless "Remember" campaign. In March, a N'Orleans-style funeral cortege wound through cheering crowds lining the streets of Brooklyn. In May, more than 200 radio stations participated in a 30-second moment of silence. And as Biggie's self-appointed Chief Mourner, Puffy poured his heart out in interview after interview, rolled up his sleeve to display his new memorial r.i.p. tattoo, wrote a stricken "Dear Big" letter for the liner notes to his melancholy solo debut No Way Out. A sad-eyed Lil' Kim even posed with a box of her former boyfriend's ashes in People. But nothing could top Puffy's triple-Platinum memorial single "I'll Be Missing You," which commandeered the pop and R&B singles charts throughout the summer. Overall, more than three million people "remembered" to buy B.I.G.'s sophomore double-CD Life After Death, which debuted at No. 1 a week after his death and remained in the Top 10 for 15 weeks.
"Biggie's death permeated everything this year," says Billboard rap editor Havelock Nelson. "His album got a bump from his killing, but he would have been No. 1 regardless. He was a lyricist no one was tired of and he had the marketing magic of Puffy behind him."
A Professa Higgins who recently transformed the mush-mouthed teen-rapper Mase into the "black Barney" ("Most of my fans are two, three, maybe four years old!" Mase says), Puffy was already grooming B.I.G. to be a massive pop, rather than rap, star; reengineering his persona was integral to the process. On his Platinum debut album, Ready to Die, Biggie played the role of depressed, hard-ass mutha; the "new" B.I.G., if the player-caper "Hypnotize" video is any indication, was to be a more of a dapper, Big Poppa bear -- pimp-y enough for ruffnecks, cuddly enough for kids.
The Biggie I met when I profiled him last year, however, was far more likable, far more complicated: a shy, warmhearted, deadpan funny, quick-tempered, dick-waving lost boy who made you want to hug him one minute and slap him silly the next. In part, Puffy's posthumous canonizing of Biggie is an understandable reaction to the mainstream press's callously myopic "live by the gun, die by the gun" sermonizing, which was also directed at Tupac Shakur.
But when Shakur was murdered six months earlier, Death Row Records, his label, barely bothered to cobble together a statement. Not only was the gangsta rap imprint riven by backbiting turmoil, Shakur's volatile, trouble-man charisma didn't lend itself to easy sentimentality. It's no wonder "Tupac lives" rumors are still clogging Internet chat rooms: Like the similarly dead-or-alive Jim Morrison, Shakur was always larger than life. "Tupac was more of a controversial, outlaw figure and people still don't quite understand him," says Billboard's Nelson. "On a personal level, I think people felt closer to Biggie."
Both rappers' murders, though, elicited the same "everything's-fucked-up" panic that also came with Kurt Cobain's suicide and the L.A. riots. In a cover package titled, "Now What? The Tragic Marriage of Hip-Hop and Violence," the Source ruminated on these "dark days for our entire generation." Gunned down in the midst of a ridiculous bicoastal feud that he tried to avoid, Biggie was ill-suited to serve as a rap martyr, more comfortable as one-of-the-guys than as hero or antihero. The ramifications of Cobain's death were equally complex: Fans were simultaneously shamed by his suicide, angry that he had "given up," and guilt-ridden that their own adoration had contributed to his fame-weary self-destruction. On tour promoting Live Through This a few months after her husband died, a drug-addled Courtney Love alternately cursed Cobain and begged for his forgiveness, often literally collapsing on stage. Puffy's own keeping-of-the-flame seems almost sedate by comparison.
Though skeptics have charged that "I'll Be Missing You" cashes in on tragedy -- the single conveniently primed Puffy's solo debut, although profits from the single go to a trust for Biggie's two children -- it follows a long-established hip-hop tradition: Shout-outs to "Dead Homiez" make sad sense for a demographic whose leading cause of death is homicide. (Even casket makers cater to the inner-city market; one company recently introduced a special graffiti-ready model. "You know, a kid goes, his homies can wish him well," a sales rep told Harper's.) Mourning is the one time even a badass can express affection and get emotional without seeming wack (cf. Naughty by Nature's recent "Mourn You 'Til I Join You"). "I'll Be Missing You," which features Biggie's widow, Faith Evans, the vocal quartet 112, and a shameless "Every Breath You Take" jack, is pure pop tearjerker. But it's not the sympathy-card lyrics ("In my heart is where I keep you, friend") and minor-key melody that, as a friend remarked, made her "cry on the StairMaster" the first time she heard it; it's the very real pain in Evans's and Puffy's voices. "It's a selfish song -- Faith and I just wanted to talk to Biggie," Puffy says. "We were so upset when we were recording it that we had to keep running out of the room."
"I can't even tell you how many times we played it," says DJ Angie Martinez of the New York hip-hop radio station Hot 97. "For a while it was the only song listeners were calling in for. It didn't really specify that it was about Biggie, so anybody who ever lost someone could relate to it."
Actually, "I'll Be Missing You" isn't really about Biggie at all -- it's about Puffy, which is why there is no Biggie footage in the video -- just shots of Puffy falling off his motorcycle and dancing in the rain, one-is-the-loneliest-number style. A notorious limelight stealer, Combs has made himself the focal point of a hip-hop nation's grief. Before Biggie's death, Puffy was an unlikely superstar: a shy cell-phone-and-champagne executive who exuded power, not charisma, and had little to say. His Bereavement humanized him, gave him depth, seemed to hammer home hip-hop's post-gangsta aesthetic. The "I'll Be Missing You" video's heavenly gospel imagery -- white candles, church choirs, angelic children in their Sunday best -- simultaneously whitewashes Biggie's violent death and distances the new pop-Puffy from their hard-core gangster-friendly past. Such a formula allows for no impassioned pleas to stop shooting one another or to find Biggie's killer; and without any outrage, Biggie's death borders on meaningless.
"Before Biggie died," says MTV's Director of Music Programming Stephen Hill, "Puffy said he wanted to be the feel-good entertainer of Bad Boy, that he just wanted to make you dance. If anything, though, he's now seen as introspective, almost solemn." There's more than just a commercial Midas touch behind all the videos and tribute songs and the upcoming Puffy-narrated documentary Born Again -- there's the desperate grip of someone who just can't let go. "I'm a Biggie fanatic; I have his name tattooed on my body," Puffy says. "Remembering Biggie is never going to stop."
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