Twenty-three years before Rolling Stone would describe him, in a 1995 interview, as "a mountain of a man, 6ft 3 in, 280 lbs, black as tar, with a W.C. Fields scowl and a lazy left eye," Christopher George Latore Wallace was born on May 21, 1972 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents both hailed from the Caribbean island of Jamaica — his mom, Voletta taught preschool; his pop, Selwyn, was a welder and local Jamaican politician. Selwyn left the family when Biggie was two, but Voletta worked two jobs in order to send her son to a private school — the Roman Catholic Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School; alumni include Rudy Giuliani and former Primark CEO Arthur Ryan. But Biggie subsequently transferred to the George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School; alumni include the rappers DMX, Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes. Biggie had excelled at English, but often played truant at Westinghouse and dropped out altogether in 1989 at age 17.
Synopsis
Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G., lived a short life. He was 24 years old when he was gunned down in 1997 in Los Angeles, a murder that has never been solved. Smalls was from New York and had almost single-handedly reinvented East Coast hip hop — overtaken in the early 1990s by the West Coast "g-funk" sound of Dr. Dre and Death Row Records. With his clear, powerful baritone, effortless flow on the mic and willingness to address the vulnerability, as well as the harshness, of the hustler lifestyle, Smalls swung the spotlight back towards New York and his label home, Bad Boy Records. He styled himself as a gangster and although he was no angel, in reality he was more of a performer than a hardened criminal. In this regard, he was similar to Tupac Shakur, his one-time friend turned bitter rival — a contest that spiraled horrifyingly out of control leaving neither man alive to tell the tale.
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