IT WAS ALL A DREAM- BIGGIE AND THE WORLD THAT MADE HIM
At its best, Justin Tinsley’s new biography, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him, pays tribute to that creativity — and to the short life and blinding talent of the rapper who loved it when you called him Big Poppa ... The book excels at big-picture analysis, taking the mission in its subtitle seriously. In lesser moments, it piles up malformed sentences and typos at an alarming clip, but if you can get past those, it serves as a solid and incisive if rarely revelatory summary of a hip-hop legend’s life and art ... Tinsley doesn’t break any new news on the double-barreled tragedy of Biggie and Tupac Shakur ... The author isn’t an investigative reporter, nor does he claim to be, and the subject has been examined about as intensively as any celebrity murder mystery of the past 30 years ... One of the new biography’s problems is that this has all been covered elsewhere, including in other biographies ... Then there’s the error-prone syntax — infelicities in editing and writing that add up quickly ... Sometimes the same phrases are repeated in the space of a single page. In small doses, such errors don’t matter much. Here they appear over and over again, taking the reader’s head out of the story ... The book is stronger on the macro level, filling in the context of Biggie’s life with sharp sketches of the people, events and social currents that accompanied Biggie’s rise ... It Was All a Dream makes a fine starting point for those looking to discover what all the fuss was about and why Biggie still matters.
At its best, Justin Tinsley’s new biography, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him, pays tribute to that creativity — and to the short life and blinding talent of the rapper who loved it when you called him Big Poppa ... The book excels at big-picture analysis, taking the mission in its subtitle seriously. In lesser moments, it piles up malformed sentences and typos at an alarming clip, but if you can get past those, it serves as a solid and incisive if rarely revelatory summary of a hip-hop legend’s life and art ... Tinsley doesn’t break any new news on the double-barreled tragedy of Biggie and Tupac Shakur ... The author isn’t an investigative reporter, nor does he claim to be, and the subject has been examined about as intensively as any celebrity murder mystery of the past 30 years ... One of the new biography’s problems is that this has all been covered elsewhere, including in other biographies ... Then there’s the error-prone syntax — infelicities in editing and writing that add up quickly ... Sometimes the same phrases are repeated in the space of a single page. In small doses, such errors don’t matter much. Here they appear over and over again, taking the reader’s head out of the story ... The book is stronger on the macro level, filling in the context of Biggie’s life with sharp sketches of the people, events and social currents that accompanied Biggie’s rise ... It Was All a Dream makes a fine starting point for those looking to discover what all the fuss was about and why Biggie still matters.
At its best, Justin Tinsley’s new biography, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him, pays tribute to that creativity — and to the short life and blinding talent of the rapper who loved it when you called him Big Poppa ... The book excels at big-picture analysis, taking the mission in its subtitle seriously. In lesser moments, it piles up malformed sentences and typos at an alarming clip, but if you can get past those, it serves as a solid and incisive if rarely revelatory summary of a hip-hop legend’s life and art ... Tinsley doesn’t break any new news on the double-barreled tragedy of Biggie and Tupac Shakur ... The author isn’t an investigative reporter, nor does he claim to be, and the subject has been examined about as intensively as any celebrity murder mystery of the past 30 years ... One of the new biography’s problems is that this has all been covered elsewhere, including in other biographies ... Then there’s the error-prone syntax — infelicities in editing and writing that add up quickly ... Sometimes the same phrases are repeated in the space of a single page. In small doses, such errors don’t matter much. Here they appear over and over again, taking the reader’s head out of the story ... The book is stronger on the macro level, filling in the context of Biggie’s life with sharp sketches of the people, events and social currents that accompanied Biggie’s rise ... It Was All a Dream makes a fine starting point for those looking to discover what all the fuss was about and why Biggie still matters.