The pain, and destitution, and conflict, and hardship, and desperation of Biggie’s upbringing—the glory but also the atrocity of his beloved Brooklyn—is palpable throughout Ready to Die, on hard-nosed but startlingly vulnerable songs like “Things Done Changed” and “Everyday Struggle.” But there’s something so tremendously charming to me about Voletta Wallace’s never-ending multimedia fact-checking of “Juicy.” I am charmed, I suspect, as a defense mechanism, as a feeble attempt to ease the excruciating pain of watching as this woman has to speak about the son she lost in every biography, every
...more
