My favorite thing about “Juicy”2 is the way Biggie gets to devise and burnish his own myth for a change, paint his own self-portrait masterpiece that captures his essence but keeps some of his secrets. “It was all a dream / I used to read Word Up! magazine.” Fact check: true, and that’s also very arguably the greatest opening line in rap history, because you can feel the hunger in his voice, and you can hear his awe, too, as it dawns on him that his hunger might actually be sated. This is the moment where Biggie makes it, the moment where he ascends the mountaintop and maybe climbs up onto the
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