Pour Me A Story, Vol. 21
I got a story to tell.
hey gang, welcome back to the newsletter. in case you weren’t sure, or had forgotten, I greatly appreciate your company.
this week has been a disorienting one for a number of reasons, and it was Thursday morning before I even realized it. it’s certainly true that I’ve been incredibly disorganized over the past five months when it comes to “asking folks if they’d like to be my special guest” in advance, but generally I operate best under deadline pressure and I’ve always managed to put it all together.
not this week, though, so I’m afraid there’s no special guest for you all to learn about. but as I was brushing my teeth, wracking my brain trying to figure out what I was going to put in this space, I realized I can still “pour you a story,” it’ll just be one of my stories instead. it’s a consolation prize, but as I’ve often said, you get what you pay for.
I Got A Story To Tell
on Monday, Netflix added to its roster Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell, a documentary with never-before-seen footage from the all-too-short life of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as The Notorious B.I.G., who was killed on March 9, 1997. for those who are even remotely familiar with the story of his life, there will be plenty of familiar elements: a good student brought up by a hard-working immigrant single mother; the lure of fast money selling crack cocaine on Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; the transition from the streets to the studio to the top of the rap game to being assassinated two and a half months before his 26th birthday, survived by his two children.
that scaffolding is filled out by a sample of what has to be hundreds of hours of video footage from on the block and on tour, shot by Damion “D-Roc” Butler, one of Biggie’s best friends. the documentary is further enhanced by interviews with people from a young Wallace’s orbit that haven’t been heard from in this context before: neighbors, school friends and crew lieutenants among them. Justin Tinsley over at The Undefeated has a really good review of the film.
you may be struggling to draw a connection between a rapper slain in his mid-20s and a borderline idiot 35-year-old Australian native who writes a weekly newsletter in bed eight hours before it’s due to hit inboxes, and that’s entirely understandable. bear with me, I guess.
my introduction to hip-hop music was almost accidental. I heard Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise when I was 10 and, after somehow convincing my parents to let me buy the single, I spent the entire $20 bill they gave me on the soundtrack to Dangerous Minds rather than the single. I still know that record like the back of my hand, although I definitely won’t be recommending that any 10-year-old Australian boys listen to it.
from there, the kitchen at McDonald’s was what broadened my hip-hop horizons. I would close the restaurant with older coworkers (and when I say “older,” I mean that I was 15 and they were probably like 19), during which time we could choose our own music, and I was exposed to a much wider range of artists, from Tha Alkaholiks to Outkast and everything in between. that’s where I first heard The Notorious B.I.G.
since I’m a powerful creature of habit, I’ve listened to all four of his albums (even Duets, to my chagrin) to pieces over the past 20 years and, oddly enough, it was one song in particular that helped motivate me to make my U.S. immigration journey a reality.
back in 2012 I was going through a rough patch professionally and personally, and I wanted to shake everything up. therapy was helping but that was only once every other week and I needed a talisman of sorts to hold onto. it came to me one day at the gym in the form of Biggie lyrics, because I was a corny 26-year-old.
Sky’s the limit and you know that you keep on
Just keep on pressin' on
Sky’s the limit and you know that you can have
What you want, be what you want
and honestly, that kept me going through the shitty end of 2012 and the opening months of 2013, where my plan to wrap up my affairs in Australia and give “moving to the U.S.” all of my effort and energy. “sky’s the limit” and “keep on pressin’ on” became my mantras to the point that I had my friend Molly, whom you met way back in Volume 8, design me a tattoo incorporating those words and, of course, the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t get around to bringing it to life, but never say never.
so, despite no obvious connection or relatability between one of the greatest rappers of all time, whose life was cut short and left listeners with a lot of “what ifs,” and the aforementioned Australian idiot, Big’s music was significant to me during the times in my life when I needed those words.
late in the summer of 2012, when I escaped life for a while to spend a few weeks stateside, I spent a couple nights in Bed-Stuy, in an Airbnb apartment a mile and a half from Christopher Wallace’s childhood home. one afternoon, before heading out for a night which ended at 4 a.m. with a pocketful of a bartender’s cash after a long night playing cee-lo, I sat on the fire escape and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood Biggie had grown up in, and felt like maybe everything was gonna work out.
Worthy Consumables
I’ve long said that, for me, exercise is nothing more than my way of mentally justifying eating and drinking like “cholesterol” and “diabetes” aren’t things. so with that disclaimer in mind, I’m still setting myself up to be judged pretty heavily.
have you ever been served an ad on social media so absurd that you simply had no choice but to order the product? again, perhaps this is just me, but it happened a few months ago and it happened again this week.
the product in question is Chick N’Skin, a snack food which purports to be “the part of chicken you love!” now, this is unfair because I love almost all parts of the chicken, not just the skin. it’s basically pork rinds but from another barnyard animal.
anyway I’m no dietician or anything remotely resembling a nutritionist, but you can tell these things are not in any way good for you. it’s literally just seasoned fried chicken skin chips. I know some of you reading this will judge me, but I know others will probably quietly click through that link and buy them for yourself. and to those folks, I say: great move. everything in moderation. the Buffalo Wing flavor is a stand-out.
Parting Note
this one should be obvious, but I already posted Sky’s The Limit earlier in the piece, so here’s another song from The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous second album, Life After Death. it’s one of dozens of examples of how incredible the man was as a storyteller and how vividly he could paint a scene you could imagine yourself in.
thanks as always for sharing some time with me, pals. enjoy the week and I’ll catch you again, hopefully better prepared, next Friday.
— adrian ✌🏻