So I finally got around to watching the Biggie & Tupac documentaries (Bigger Than Life and Life of An Outlaw, respectively; both streamable on Netflix) and I gotta say, I think Tupac's edges it out a bit. It's interesting... comparing the two, Biggie comes off as "realer" but Tupac as simultaneously more phony and psychotic. Big Skye (one of Pac's sideline guys, in the group Thug Life, which, if you aren't hip to the album Thug Life, Vol. 1 yet you should kill yourself. seriously.) calls him an "educated nut", and that about nails it. It's evident in their attitude towards guns: Big dropped out of high school and toted gats while doing drug deals nonchalantly, while Tupac was being tutored by an artsy new-age San Franciscan white lady, but later Pac becomes a gun aficionado, does interviews at the shooting range, discussing the technicals of armor-piercing bullets, etc. This basically explains everything about their personalities, and leaves the impression that, if not for rap, B.I.G. would've probably ended up in jail, while Pac might be a college professor at Howard U.
This isn't to discredit Pac though; indeed, he has the better story and movie, and crew, and collected body of work, really. I know you don't believe me. I didn't believe me for a long time. But check the title of this post - that's one of the Pac-fathered crews, aka Dramacydal:
Or fuck with this for a second:
Play all of the Dramacydal stuff on Youtube, and you'll realize there's no shortage. Then realize they didn't even release one album. Instead, these guys were all involved in a constellation of west-coast crews loosely involved with 2Pac, and all of it sounds just as fresh, if not more-so, than Junior M.A.F.I.A.
Pac was apparently big on stayin' true to the game, always curating new artists on the come up. Here he directs some prototypical West Coast joint (this is about as '93 as it gets):
Anyway, I could go on about the films, how Shock G - where is he now? - is more of a compelling screen presence than Method Man (Bigger Than Life's main interviewee), etc, but no one really cares what some white dude in the suburbs of 2010 thinks about all this shit, do they?
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