Biggie was giving us news, he was giving us the “Ten Crack Commandments,” he was giving us skits a la Prince Paul in the De La Soul days ― Jay Z offering up his thoughts on Mike Tyson and boxers pulling Pete Rose moves, R&B magic with a pre-peeing on underage girls Robert Kelly ― the full arsenal of artistic emcee prowess. Yes, you had to purchase CDs! But for Biggie, we took no shorts D went to Music Factory on the Fordham Rd., copped the cd, and came back to the crib, and we listened ― no different than families would do almost forty and fifty years prior, tuning into FDR or JFK on their radio stations. Our only source of music information and purchasing at the time was the bootleg man (if you don’t know, ask me) on Fordham Rd., or Music Factory, Circuit City, HMV, and Tower Records. This is before the days of LimeWire, Napster, and what would follow thereafter ― SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify, Tidal and a bajillion other streaming music sites. D and I sat in our mother’s two-bedroom in the Bronx, and I watched him unwrap the double-CD packaging (a feat in and of itself, seeing how Tupac was the only mainstream Hip-Hop artist to venture into the double-disc territory with “All Eyez on Me,” which was released a few months prior to Tupac’s unsolved murder), and listened―all the way through―with our added hood-side commentary (“yooo, rewind that back.lemme hear that again” and “He said what?!”) to what I still consider a masterpiece of modern art.
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