Long-Lost Brothers

By the end of Richard Wright’s Native Son, the majority of Chicago’s citizens, both White and Black, see Bigger Thomas as the “bad nigger.” The media and the state have portrayed him as a merciless rapist and murderer, and even though Bigger’s attorney Boris Max has provided a sociological framework for his defense, it falls on deaf ears, and subsequently, Bigger is sentenced to death. The audience within the book, comprised of Chicago’s citizens, may not want to “know” Bigger, but the audience outside the book—Wright’s readership—is a different animal. Wright succeeds where Max fails. Over the course of 400 pages, the reader of Native Son has become intimately acquainted with Bigger’s consciousness. The reader watches Bigger struggle toward an identity for himself. In the end, revelation arrives in a form both intellectual and spiritual, but it also comes with a price. Bigger pays for such revelation with his life.

As noted by other scholars, Bigger has much in common with the protagonists of gangsta rap, that notorious hip-hop subgenre that ignited a firestorm of controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both Bigger and the gangsta antihero are associated with sociopathic violence and misogyny. They are both a kind of text the public “reads” in a one-dimensional manner, projecting stereotypes and assumptions onto the Black male body. Although this may sound unlikely, the creators of these characters also have much in common. Arguably, Wright and gangsta rappers both access an African American storytelling tradition by employing the trope of the “bad nigger.” They also share other storytelling strategies and techniques, such as their canny invocation of extreme violence and their use of misogyny and materialism, to grab the attention of a patriarchal White culture that routinely ignores African Americans. The culture at large reflexively responds to their work because of America’s obsession with sex, violence, and money. Both Wright and gangsta rappers also employ metaphor. In other words, their work stands as a figurative protest against a racist society. In addition, Wright and gangsta rappers participate in acts of identity formation. Their respective art forms provide them with a platform to speak their minds, which enables them to assert their masculinity. For both, proving one’s manhood is a priority in a racist culture that routinely attempts to emasculate them.

In the pages that follow, I will build on scholarship that already links Bigger Thomas to real-life gangsta rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. James Baxter Peterson (2007) calls Biggie Smalls a “Bigger figure” (p. 204). In other words, the popular, deceased rapper—who like many rappers built a semiautobiographical persona to appear in his songs—was a kind of literary descendant of Bigger Thomas in the sense that he’s an echo of the “bad nigger” character type presented so memorably in Native Son. In his own work, Nick De Genova invokes both gangsta rap and Wright to complicate the definition of nihilism, which he describes as a state of mind resulting from two competing forces: the drive to self-preservation and the drive to self-destruction. I will argue that this definition of nihilism suggests an intellectual and emotional life for the gangsta and gangsta rapper, perhaps a dangerous claim in a culture that has largely sought to deny his humanity. Through a close reading of Native Son and Biggie Small’s seminal album Ready to Die, I aim to prove the striking similarities between Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls. Both experience existential struggles as they negotiate a society that induces a fractured psychology, causing them to fluctuate between the death impulse and the self-preservation impulse. The ramifications of my claim are stark. For one thing, my argument subscribes to a different version of nihilism, one that sees existential struggle instead of mere hopelessness and meaninglessness, while promoting the idea that (in some cases) gangsta rap stands as intellectual art consisting of nuance, subtlety, and soul. Like us all, the gangsta rapper seeks a kind of moral order, which has echoes of Bigger’s journey in Native Son. This viewpoint should revitalize discussion of the artistic and intellectual merit of gangsta rap, as well as inspire a reconsideration of the humanity of those “gangstas” whom most of society views in only two dimensions.

There is some debate about the cultural origins of hip-hop music. Many scholars argue that hip-hop or rap is the direct descendant of an oral folk tradition, which began in the days of slavery. James Cone describes two different types of slave songs. One was secular and dealt with the hardships of slave life. The other was produced by Christian slaves who came to regard the secular songs as “devil songs” (Armstrong, 2002, p. 185). This secular version morphed into the blues, which Armstrong (2002) argues was “created not just by black people but by the poorest, most marginal black people” in the Mississippi Delta (p. 184). Subsequently, rap music was born as a synthesis of the blues plus other Black cultural traditions. According to Cornel West (1999), “black rap music recovers and revises elements of black rhetorical styles—some from black preaching—and black rhythmic drumming. In short, it combines the two major organic traditions in black America—black rhetoric and black music” (p. 482). Crucially, rap echoes the blues in terms of giving voice to the Black underclass, often extracting the “utopian dimension of the Afro-American spiritual-blues impulse” (West, 1999, p. 482). In other words, rap often eschews or ignores the otherworldly hope espoused by Black Christians, focusing instead on the secular here-and-now.

Some scholars see rap as a musical form completely distinct from the oral and folk traditions. They argue that rap is something entirely new, a postmodern pastiche of various forms that ironically and subversively displays American values (materialism and patriarchy) in a grotesque and exaggerated fashion, therefore placing a spotlight on American hypocrisy. Annette Saddik (2003) describes the dual and performative nature of rap in this postmodern framework:

As Ice Cube pointed out, rapping is both “just having fun” and delivering a “social message,” and hence, like the most effective kinds of performance, confuses the boundaries between “innocent” entertainment and revolutionary impulses. This kind of subversive theatrical performance can be seen as an exposition of the black male rap artist as the disobedient “other” in relation to white patriarchal control. (p. 110)

In the 1970s, rap emerged as party music in New York City (Richardson & Scott, 2002). But by the 1980s, it was being performed with another purpose in mind. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five initiated an era of political or “conscious” rap with their 1982 single “The Message,” which Tricia Rose (1994) says coincided with hard economic times in New York City:

Hip hop emerge[d] from the de-industrialization meltdown where social alienation, prophetic imagination, and yearning intersect . . . [It] is a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutality, truncated opportunity, and oppression within cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity and community. (p. 21)

Around the same time, West Coast rappers sought to express their own lived experiences. Their aesthetic was a million miles away from party rap. Ice-T dubbed his brand of rap “reality-based” because of its reliance on autobiographical events, such as “running from the police,” and its straightforward use of language (Armstrong, 2002, p. 182). But it was N.W.A.’s 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, with its explosive anger and violence toward police, that “flipped hip-hop music on its head and began the bumrushing of the American pop music mainstream, the aftershocks of which would exile political and socially conscious styles of hip-hop to the commercial abyss” (White, 2011, p. 64). Nathan Abrams has defined gangsta rap as a controversial hip-hop subgenre known globally for “its vivid sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic lyrics, as well as its violent depiction of urban ghetto life in America” (quoted in Kubrin, 2005, p. 360). Charis Kubrin (2005) believes that gangsta rap owes a creative debt to “early depictions of the hustler lifestyle and blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, which glorified blacks as criminals, pimps, pushers, prostitutes, and gangsters” (p. 360). Cheryl Keyes situates gangsta rap geographically with mostly West Coast artists as “a product of the gang culture and street wars of South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and Long Beach” (quoted in Kubrin, 2005, pp. 360-361). According to Adam Krims, gangsta rap portrays a criminal lifestyle because its purveyors were gangbangers themselves (Kubrin, 2005).

With its rise in commercial success, gangsta rap began to spread geographically as practitioners emerged from all over the country. Christopher Wallace through his persona of The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls, aka Big Poppa) was an East Coast rapper who seemed to capture the zeitgeist for “black males of his approximate class and generation in New York City at the beginning of the 1990s” (Collins, 2006, p. 911). According to Michael Collins (2006), New York City was no easy place to be a young Black male in light of the 1989 brutal rape and beating of a White woman dubbed by the media “the Central Park Jogger”: “The original convictions [of five African American and Hispanic teenagers] and blanket media coverage nevertheless provided invaluable reinforcement for the late twentieth-century stereotype of ‘young black males’ as incarnations of violence” (p. 912). Recognizing its power as a trope, Biggie did not shy away from this stereotype; rather, according to Collins, he embraced it in his music: “Wallace liked to push the envelope of gangsta rap themes, and of the ‘bad nigger’ persona his voice projected” (p. 912).

While no doubt taking his cue from both personal and social realities, Biggie also borrows extensively from the intellectual and artistic traditions of American culture. Collins (2006) makes this point as he lists a variety of works that Smalls synthesizes to capture America’s obsession with violence:

The source of his dramatic vocabulary, however, was the gangster rap and gangster movies that gave him a literary lineage that includes the N.W.A. and Death Row crews, the Mario van Peebles who made New Jack City, the Brian DePalma who made Scarface, the Martin Scorsese of Casino, the Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather series, and, perhaps above all, the Bible, which includes not only the parables that Biggie’s best raps are, but the eye-for-an-eye epics and jeremiads of which the whole gangster ethic (and aesthetic) is a kind of distorted mirror image. (p. 913)

Along with other gangsta rappers, Biggie has been associated with nihilism. Nihilism may have a straightforward meaning in the culture at large, but it deserves more nuanced treatment. Given our purposes, nihilism does not refer to “any nineteenth-century philosophical doctrines about the rational impermissibility of authority” (De Genova, 1995, p. 92). Instead, it refers to the African American mind-set (incidentally, a kind of echo of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness) created by American capitalism and American racism. In his 1991 essay “Nihilism in Black America,” as described by Collins, Cornel West defines nihilism in relation to African American communities in the crack cocaine era:

West, however, points his finger not at crack itself but at the conditions that allowed it to become both a primary source of economic opportunity and a means of escape from the “nihilism” brought on by, among other things, a chronic lack of such opportunities and a constant mass-media-induced consciousness of the goodies and the attendant “prop” other people have. Defining nihilism for the purposes of the essay as “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness,” West traces the phenomenon back to white supremacy that has hung like a poison in the air for African Americans since the institutionalization of slavery and its attendant rhetoric. (Collins, 2006, p. 918)

West (1999) sees the influence of this version of nihilism in gangsta rap music. He views rap in general as “the last form of transcendence available to young black ghetto dwellers,” gesturing positively toward the “conscious” or political rap subgenre (p. 483). But he does not look as kindly on gangsta rap, which he describes as a postmodern attempt to “subvert, undermine and parody transcendence itself” (p. 483). West contrasts gangsta rap with African American spiritual blues, which is “based on the supposition that somebody—God, Mom or neighbors—cares” (p. 483). Gangsta rap represents a challenge to that supposition and consequently, in his view, stands as a roadblock to African American progress within the wider culture.

De Genova invokes Richard Wright to take issue with West’s negative conceptualization of nihilism. De Genova acknowledges the negative conditions that create a nihilistic mind-set, but he does not view nihilism in a purely negative light. Instead, he asserts that the nihilism in gangsta rap creates a space to explore “meaningful human complexities” and espouse a radical politics (De Genova, 1995, p. 90). He is interested in Wright’s perspective on nihilism as a creative force for oppressed Black males:

For Richard Wright, the urgent questions of life and death were often mediated by a kind of nihilism. This nihilism typically staked the possibilities for freedom—and for life itself—upon a remorseless rejection and subversion of moral conventions and upon an impulse for destruction, which frequently could be resolved only in self-destruction. (De Genova, 1995, p. 89)

Nihilism, then, breeds an existential approach to life that secures for the Black male a kind of freedom and identity denied to him through socially accepted channels in a racist society. The weapons of nihilism are criminal and violent behavior. In the late 20th century, the use of rhetoric—the gangsta rapper’s sharp and swift tongue—becomes another weapon in the arsenal.

De Genova also claims that nihilism produces “an undaunted yearning, desperate (violently so, perhaps even to the extreme of self-destruction) but not hopeless, meaningful in its furious revolt against a world of bewildering violence and meaningless death” (De Genova, 1995, pp. 101-102).

This is a far cry from the one-dimensional nihilism presented by West. In De Genova’s and Wright’s twin conceptions, nihilism comprises hope and yearning, which no doubt take a unique form in the gangsta rapper’s universe. Even so, they are nevertheless present and serve to humanize the likes of Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls. Through the presentation of their consciousness, through the forms of the novel and rap songs, respectively, we see that the two characters have emotional lives. A sort of narrative paradigm becomes clear as we analyze Native Son and Ready to Die. A lack of agency (no material wealth, no economic opportunity, no status) leads to antisocial and creative attempts to gain agency. Usually this entails violence. This generative behavior has a symbiotic relationship with self-destruction. As the Black male creates for himself, he also travels down a road of self-destruction. The circumstances evoked by participation in the “Game”—placing oneself in an environment where violent men compete with each other to win money and status—operate like the opening of an urban Pandora’s box. Death is often literally around the corner.

It would be instructive at this point to see how nihilism lives and breathes as a guiding and existential force in Native Son and Ready to Die. I will start with an analysis of the former.

When we meet Bigger Thomas, he is already a part of an early incarnation of the Game. He is poor and hopeless in spite of a prospective job opportunity. He knows intrinsically that such a job can only take him so far in life and that his real aspirations—he once wanted to be a pilot—can never be realized because he is barred from such avenues by a racist society. At least the Game offers a kind of agency, and to his friends in the pool hall, he resurrects a plan to rob Blum’s grocery store. Jack and G.H. quickly agree to take part, with Gus the lone holdout. The latter’s hesitation is a challenge to Bigger’s status as de facto leader of the group, and Bigger sees no other choice but to respond with violence. In the Game, violence is a ubiquitous presence and the most effective means to power. From the outside, when Bigger punishes Gus for his late arrival ahead of the robbery, he would appear to be nothing more than a thug. But he becomes more than that by virtue of the simple fact that he’s the protagonist in Wright’s novel. We’re not just privy to his actions; we see into his mind as well. In his mind, Bigger harbors doubt and fear about robbing Blum’s:

He was divided and pulled against himself . . . Bigger was afraid of robbing a white man and he knew that Gus was afraid, too. He had argued all of his pals but one into consenting to the robbery, and toward the lone man who held out he felt hot hate and fear; he had transferred his fear of the whites to Gus. He hated Gus because he knew that Gus was afraid, as even he was; and he feared Gus because he felt that Gus would consent and then he would be compelled to go through with the robbery. (Wright, 2005, p. 25)

Bigger’s psychological complexity is on display here. He is portrayed as not just a one-dimensional thug but a human being with a complex emotional life. He is vulnerable, full of contradictory feelings. He wants Gus to consent because it would affirm his power within the group. But at the same time, he understands what it would bring; he would have to go through with the robbery, the prospect of which terrifies him.

In the end, Bigger assaults and humiliates Gus in an act of self-sabotage that causes them to miss their window of opportunity. He has some awareness of his motivation, but he also understands that too much self-awareness might threaten his prospects for survival:

His confused emotions had made him feel instinctively that it would be better to fight Gus and spoil the plan of the robbery than to confront a white man with a gun. But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. (Wright, 2005, p. 42)

Survival in Bigger’s world revolves around the maintenance of self-conviction. To let fear or self-doubt materialize would open the door to self-destruction.

The killing of Mary Dalton is no premeditated act, and yet once it happens, Bigger embraces the experience. He believes the act liberates him. Such a transgressive act provides him with agency, as well as a new and formidable identity:

Now that the ice was broken, could he not do other things? What was there to stop him? While sitting there at the table waiting for his breakfast, he felt that he was arriving at something which had long eluded him. Things were becoming clear; he would know how to act from now on. (Wright, 2005, p. 106)

Bigger believes that Mary’s death will unlock some blueprint telling him how to act, but what actually happens is more internal than external. The killing sparks an emotional and intellectual journey.

In the beginning, Bigger feels justified in killing Mary who becomes for him a symbol for all the shame and fear he’s felt his entire life (Wright, 2005). He’s not sure where those emotions came from, but it’s less difficult for the reader to infer that they are the byproducts of a racist society. In this new incarnation of self, Bigger sees other people as a means to some end. Sometimes the end is simply pleasure. For example, he wishes “he could clench his fist and swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie’s face and leave the other [Bessie’s body] helpless and yielding before him” (Wright, 2005, p. 140). At other times, the end is financial, as when he hatches a kidnapping scheme to extort money from the Daltons. It’s part and parcel of a mentality associated with the Game. You get what you can get, given the circumstances. You exploit the situation. This is nothing new for Bigger, but other feelings begin to surface as well:

He felt that he had his destiny in his grasp. He was more alive than he could ever remember having been; his mind and attention were pointed, focused toward a goal. For the first time in his life he moved consciously between two sharply defined poles: he was moving away from the threatening penalty of death, from the deathlike times that brought him that tightness and hotness in his chest; and he was moving toward that sense of fullness he had so often but inadequately felt in magazines and movies. (Wright, 2005, pp. 149-150)

Bigger feels like a new, whole man who is at last in control of his life. His murder of Bessie only reinforces this sense of power:

And, yet, out of it all, over and above all that had happened, impalpable but real, there remained to him a queer sense of power. He had done this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. (Wright, 2005, p. 239)

Yet for all of his emerging individuality and agency, Bigger still yearns to connect with others:

It was when he read the newspapers or magazines, went to the movies, or walked along the streets with crowds, that he felt what he wanted: to merge himself with others and be a part of this world, to lose himself in it so he could find himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black. (Wright, 2005, p. 240)

A paradox is expressed here. In order to feel satisfied as a human being, one must be allowed to express his individuality, but at the same time, one must feel part of the group. A sense of wholeness cannot be achieved without both. That Bigger is able to apprehend this paradox speaks volumes about his intellectual capacity. He may not be articulate or educated, but by presenting Bigger’s inner life, his ability to grasp complexity, Wright essentially argues that Bigger is much more than a criminal or thug. He has a mental life, which is just as rich as yours or mine.

After his capture, Bigger experiences a rollercoaster of emotions. He loses his hate for White people and the White world, for he senses that hate at this point would be futile (Wright, 2005). He loses all desire to struggle and even the will to live (Wright, 2005, p. 274). But then a new hope arises in him:

A new pride and a new humility would have to be born in him, a humility springing from a new identification with some part of the world in which he lived, and this identification forming the basis for a new hope that would function in him as pride and dignity. (Wright, 2005, p. 275)

As soon as this positive thought enters his mind, he doubts it will ever come to pass: “maybe there was no such thing for him; maybe he would have to go to his end just as he was, dumb, driven, with the shadow of emptiness in his eyes” (Wright, 2005, p. 275). Later, when Jan visits him, Bigger feels remorse about killing Mary for the first time. He also experiences another first: “For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him; and the reality of Jan’s humanity came with a stab of remorse: he had killed what this man loved and had hurt him” (Wright, 2005, p. 289). By granting Jan his humanity, Bigger becomes more human—and therefore a more sympathetic character—himself.

The fluctuations of thought and mood occur throughout “Book Three: Fate.” In that section, illustrating further his vulnerable and impressionable state of mind, Bigger renounces both religion and hope after seeing a cross burned in front of his eyes by men who want to do him harm (Wright, 2005, p. 340). Later, when Max visits, he experiences a “wave of excitement” as he finally gets to express his thoughts on Mary’s death (Wright, 2005, p. 348). It’s an important moment for Bigger who has struggled with articulation in the past. Like Mary’s death, his conversation with Max feels liberating. This intimacy with Max leads him down a road of inquiry:

He would not mind dying now if he could only find out what this meant, what he was in relation to all the others that lived, and the earth upon which he stood. Was there some battle everybody was fighting, and he had missed it? . . . But he was not interested in hating them [Whites] now. He had to die. It was more important to him to find out what this new tingling, this new elation, this new excitement meant. (Wright, 2005, p. 363)

This spirit of inquiry represents a moment of emotional and intellectual growth for Bigger. Despair descends once again after his murder conviction, but in the novel’s climax, Bigger reaches for transcendence. Finally, he not only demonstrates self-knowledge but he is also able to articulate it as he tells Max that he hurt people because he had no choice. He speaks of his thwarted aspirations. In the end, he also confesses his vulnerability: “I thought they [white people] were hard and I acted hard . . . But I ain’t hard, Mr. Max. I ain’t hard even a little bit” (Wright, 2005, p. 425). Bigger experiences an epiphany during the course of his conversation with Max. He understands that his crimes were forged by a society, which sought to deny him and other Blacks the right to the American Dream. In that moment, he is able to connect himself to others, White people included. He understands that hope is what underlies all of humanity. These breakthroughs in thought and language constitute the climax of the novel, and they allow Bigger to establish an identity tragically just as he is on the brink of death:

They wouldn’t let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain’t fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn’t want to kill. But when I think of why all the killing was, I begin to feel what I wanted, what I am . . . (Wright, 2005, pp. 428-429).

Even in the 1930s, Wright was well aware of the power of Black music and, in a sense, prophesized the arrival of rap: “Our hunger for expression finds its form in our wild, raw music, in our invention of slang that winds its way all over America” (quoted. in De Genova, 1995, p. 102). Wright would have recognized Biggie Smalls’ persona in Ready to Die as a close descendant of Bigger Thomas. The album, which catapulted Biggie to stardom, offers an everyman tale of life in the ghetto. Biggie’s journey is paradigmatic up to a point. His childhood is full of deprivation and struggle. Even the moment of birth is grim as, on the track “Respect,” the umbilical cord threatens to strangle Biggie to death:

Then came the worst date, May 21st / 2:19, that’s when my momma water burst / No spouse in the house so she rode for self / to the hospital, to see if she could get a little help / Umbilical cord’s wrapped around my neck / I’m seein’ my death and I ain’t even took my first step. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

We see in these lines the beginning of a scenario familiar to many families in the ghetto. The absent father forecasts a life of hardship, which begins in infancy as Biggie struggles to exit the womb. In “Juicy,” Biggie raps about the extreme poverty that afflicted his household: “We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us / No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us / Birthdays was the worst days” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). Biggie’s awareness of their poverty breeds resentment toward his mother on the track “Ready to Die”: “My mother didn’t give me what I want, what the fuck?” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). Biggie’s struggles at home are an echo of Bigger Thomas’s home life. The urban ghetto of the late 20th century is not so different from the bleak kitchenette of the 1930s.

Early on in Ready to Die, we see the beginnings of envy, a key emotion in ghetto life. Collins (2006) discusses envy as an animating force not only in the ghetto but in America at large. Rap music brings this fact to the fore:

Previous pop music and various traditions of poetry have done much to illuminate the deep and surface currents of love. But hip hop has built its epics in the very vortex of the struggle for existence and success: A place where envy is more ubiquitous and perhaps more powerful than love, inasmuch as envy is a register of relative poverty in a culture where the desire to escape actual or perceived economic disenfranchisement can be all-consuming. What is more, the fact that envy can fuel everything from high school to corporate to academic pecking orders means that hip hop, in its intense focus on this emotion (and its mirror image, the refusal of honor involved in “disrespecting” someone), casts into relief a relatively little-discussed element of modern society. (p. 914)

Envy thrusts an adolescent Biggie into the world of the Game, which stands as the only realistic option for him and others to escape extreme poverty. In the 1980s, the Game means a universe in which selling crack and robbing others are the two jobs that bring an income. In this universe, a man is measured by his wealth, as well as his physical toughness. In this context, Bigger Thomas comes to mind, particularly the scenes in which Bigger physically dominates Gus and then later as he flaunts the money taken from Mary. Both times, he does these things in front of his friends as a display of power. As strange as it sounds, the Game offers a kind of hope to those, including Biggie Smalls, who have only known deprivation:

But the paradox, evident in Biggie’s rhymes, is that the invisible hand of the market, whose fingertips took the form of pale crack rocks in many poor city neighborhoods in the 1980s, was and is a source of hope that promises—and often delivers—an end to “meaninglessness, hopelessness and (most important) lovelessness.” (Collins, 2006, p. 918)

The nihilism of the inner city may breed inaction, but it is also true that it has fostered an economic marketplace—the Game—where one can thrive if he acts as an entrepreneur.

Biggie decides to take part. It is an exercise of the will that signifies an act of identity formation, but the Game’s reliance on violence as a tool for both coercion and self-protection also threatens self-destruction. The Game initiates a kind of dance with death. Biggie has dropped out of school and is selling crack by the age of 13:

Now I’m thirteen, smokin’ blunts, makin’ cream / On the drug scene, fuck a football team / Riskin’ ruptured spleens by the age of sixteen / Hearin’ the coach scream at my lifetime dream, I mean / I wanna blow up, stack my dough up / So school I didn’t show up, it fucked my flow up. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

School and sports neither offer the immediate financial return of the Game nor do they offer a kind of individual freedom apart from the demands of authority figures. For Biggie, the decision is an easy one.

In the song “Juicy,” Biggie employs violence to build his reputation and secure a payday: “I rob and steal because that money got that whip appeal / Kickin niggaz down the steps just for rep / Any repercussion lead to niggaz gettin wet” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). In the Game, he perpetrates violence for financial gain without consideration for his victims. If they happen to fight back, he’s absolutely willing to shoot and kill them. Like Bigger in Native Son, he views violence as an instrument that builds his identity or reputation. Violence is transformational, making him into an intimidating figure whom others leave alone.

For all his boasting, Biggie acknowledges the psychological toll of the Game. In “Machine Gun Funk,” he raps about the daily stresses of the job and waxes nostalgic about a time when he wasn’t dealing:

Selling drugs to all the losers mad buddha abuser / But they don’t know about the stress-filled day / Baby on the way mad bills to pay / That’s why you drink Tanqueray / So you can reminisce and wish / You wasn’t living so devilish shit / I remember I was just like you / Smoking blunts with my crew / Flipping oldies 62’s. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

Here, on a psychological level, the drug dealer is not so different from the middle-class father struggling to meet his financial responsibilities while also anticipating with some anxiety the birth of his child. Biggie humanizes himself with these lines. We get a glimpse of his emotional life. He may project a monolithic hardness to the world, but we know that he suffers. In this track, we hear an echo of Bigger’s declaration of vulnerability at the end of Native Son. Bigger and Biggie both act “hard,” but what lies underneath is a different story, a mixture of anxiety and vulnerability.

Biggie prioritizes money over rapping until he is arrested and serves time in jail. In “Respect,” his incarceration serves as a wake-up call that causes him to reevaluate his priorities:

Rap was secondary, money was necessary / Until I got incarcerated—kinda scary / C74-Mark 8 set me straight / Not able to move behind the great steel gate / Time to contemplate, damn, where did I fail? / All the money I stacked was all the money for bail. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

In the 1980s, the explosion of rap onto the mainstream music scene offered urban youth another means to negotiate the nihilism of the ghetto. In the world of Ready to Die, Biggie takes advantage of this sea change in the culture, using his vocal and literary talents to win status and riches. In place of employing actual violence, he begins to rap about violence. In “Gimme the Loot,” he effectively satirizes the tough talk of gangsters. Biggie and an accomplice talk themselves up before embarking on a crime spree:

Nigga, you ain’t got to explain shit / I’ve been robbin motherfuckers since the slave ships / with the same clip and the same four-five / Two point-blank, a motherfucker’s sure to die / That’s my word, nigga even try to bogart / have his mother singing “It’s so hard . . .” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

He sees a clear distinction between the tough talk in gangsta rap and the actual violence on the streets. This distance between rhetoric and reality is emphasized at the end of the song as the criminals not only fail in their plans but also invite the attention of the police. They can talk a good game, but when it comes to the actual carrying out of crime, they prove inept.

In this and other songs, Biggie signals his exit from the Game. In “Machine Gun Funk,” he explicitly disavows the Game: “Huh, I’m doin rhymes now, fuck the crimes now / Come on the ave, I’m real hard to find now” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994).

In spite of this commitment to change, not everyone in the community is willing to acknowledge his exit, and this becomes a problem both in Biggie’s music and in real life.

Biggie’s proficiency with language is transformational. It allows him to climb the socioeconomic ladder. He has much in common with Bigger Thomas, but it is his facility with language that ultimately separates him from the Biggers of the world. There is a somewhat strange connection here between gangsta rap and the African American progressives of the past. The latter often saw literacy as a vehicle to success within American society. It is probably safe to say that they never imagined something like gangsta rap would actualize their vision. Yet, Biggie’s commercial and artistic success does not secure an escape. He remains subject to the conditions of the Game. Indeed, he becomes more of a target because of his success, which breeds envy in others and a significant amount of anxiety in Biggie. This anxiety surfaces in a number of songs on Ready to Die and escalates to the point of paranoia. In “Warning,” he receives an early morning call from a friend informing him of a plot against his life: “It’s my man Pop from the barbershop / told me he was in the gamblin spot and heard the intricate plot / some people wanna stick you like fly paper neighbor” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). The alleged plotters are people from his past who want to make a name off his name: “you school be bout some niggas / that you knew from back when, / when you was clockin minor figures / Now they heard you blowin up like nitro / know they wanna stick the knife / through your windpipe slow” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). Biggie acknowledges that in this new world he has built, he may be surrounded by enemies disguised as friends: “it’s the ones that smoke blunts witcha / see your picture, now they wanna / grab they guns and come and getcha” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). The song ends with the voices of would-be assassins approaching Biggie’s house. Biggie shoots them, but their death hardly signifies an end to the threat.

In the next track, “Ready to Die,” Biggie boasts about his rhyming skills before transitioning to nihilistic proclamations that amount to a death wish: “My shit is deep, deeper than my grave G / I’m ready to die and nobody can save me / Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / My life is played out like a jheri curl, I’m ready to die” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). The juxtaposition seems strange at first glance. His prowess as a rapper—his wealth and success—coexists with nihilism. In a traditional and mythological sense, the American Dream allows one to escape from a life of material and spiritual destitution. But this is not the case for Biggie and other young Black men who may have attained status and wealth but cannot remove themselves from the Game. Their American Dream is more like a nightmare.

It is not only Biggie at risk either; his loved ones are in jeopardy as well. “Me and My Bitch” conveys his anxiety about the vulnerability of his significant other. In the song, she is as much a participant in the Game as he is. Her status as a woman does not exempt her from the Game, and in the end, she is murdered in large part because of her connection to Biggie:

It didn’t take long before the tears start / I saw my bitch dead with the gunshot to the heart / And I know it was meant for me / I guess the niggaz felt they had to kill the closest one to me (uh, yeah) / And when I find em your life is to an end / They killed my best friend . . . me and my bitch. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

The song is fictional. Biggie never lost a wife or girlfriend to violence, but it is clear that the song serves as a projection of his fear and anxiety. A commitment to violence, in his life and then his music, leads to paranoia regarding his safety as well as the safety of loved ones.

The album has a few rays of sunlight. In “Respect,” Biggie asserts that he is a changed person. Flush with success, he claims indirectly to have left the Game. He refers to a better relationship with his mother and even delivers some brotherly advice to other young males on the streets:

Ninety-four, now I explore new horizons / Mama smile when she see me, that’s surprisin’ / Honeys is tantalizin’, they freak all night / Peep duckin’ cops on the creep all night / As I open my eyes and realizin’ I changed / Not the same deranged child stuck up in the game / And to my niggas livin’ street life / Learn to treat life to the best, put stress to rest / Still tote your vest man, niggas be trippin’. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

However, this respite from anxiety does not last and recalls Bigger’s fluctuations in mood in Native Son. In the next song, “Friend of Mine,” Biggie returns to a pitiless, hard stance. He raps that he “Don’ love no ho, that’s my principle” before explaining that he cannot afford to get close to anyone because of the potential for betrayal:

(You know) they might be the one to set me up / Wanna get their little brother to wet me up / That’s why I tote Tecs and stuff to get’em off my case / Just in case the little fucker ends up misplaced / I don’t give a bitch enough to catch the bus / and when I see the semen I’m leavin’ / Bitches be schemin’, I kid ya not. (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

Biggie’s psyche is an unstable place as he swings between positive and negative emotions: anxiety, paranoia, love, hate, and finally, self-loathing. It is an almost carbon copy of the psychological warfare taking place in Bigger’s mind, in Book Three of Native Son. In the final song on Ready to Die, Biggie’s psyche collapses under the weight of the Game. Cultural critics have claimed that gangsta rap has no soul and that the young males portrayed have no conscience. “Suicidal Thoughts” contradicts that claim as Biggie comes face to face with the abyss. The dramatic situation is a late-night phone call to a friend. What follows is a suicidal monologue about Biggie’s transgressions and his regrets:

When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell / Cause I’m a piece of shit, it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell / It don’t make sense, goin’ to heaven wit the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Tims and black hoodies . . . / All my life I been considered as the worst / Lyin’ to my mother, even stealin’ out her purse / Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion / I know my mother wished she got a fuckin’ abortion / She don’t even love me like she did when I was younger / Suckin’ on her chest just to stop my fuckin’ hunger / I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes? (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)

Collins (2006) argues that in this song, Biggie has subjected his life to a moral examination and found it wanting:

The gangsta persona who earlier on the CD proclaims himself so dangerous as to be “crazier than a bag of fucking angel dust,” implodes when he views himself from the perspective of the old school morality that “the game” upends but that he longs ultimately to be validated by. Everything he regrets in the brilliant couplets of “Suicidal Thoughts”—with the exception, significantly, of the disrespecting of his mother—is celebrated elsewhere in his oeuvre. (p. 930)

In the song, Biggie regrets the crimes he committed against others, including his mother. In fact, he wishes he had never been born. In a sense, he gives up agency in this song. He has spent the entire album asserting his identity. On the strength of his will, he has pulled himself up from poverty. He has used his proficiency with language to win fame and fortune. Yet for all of this, he fails to rise above the Game. It encircles him until he feels entirely vulnerable and powerless: “I’m sick of niggas lyin’, I’m sick of bitches hawkin’, / matter of fact, I’m sick of talkin’” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994). Metaphorically, he holds up his hands. The Game even strips him of his desire to rap. In terms of agency, the only option left is suicide. The song, along with the album, ends with a gunshot as Biggie presumably shoots himself. Revelation is present here as in the climax of Native Son. While Bigger and Biggie have different emotional experiences brought about by this revelation—the former experiences a kind of exhilaration while the latter self-loathing—both seek connection with the outer world. Both have experienced transformation because of their commitment to individual identity, but in the end they understand that wholeness comes from a connection with others. In Bigger’s case, he is inspired by his intimate conversation with Max to discover the thing that connects all human beings. For Biggie, he makes himself subject to the moral code of society. He acts as his own judge, jury, and executioner.

There is a kind of symmetry to the suffering in Ready to Die. For all the suffering he causes, Biggie finds himself visited by an equal amount of suffering. The album feels like an illustration of a radical form of suffering, and it stands as an emotional portrait not typically associated with rappers or inner-city youth. Biggie’s project is no different than Wright’s project more than half a century before. Both artists were committed to illuminating—for largely White audiences, no less—the racist conditions in society that motivate the psychology and behavior of young Black males in this country. Both Wright and Biggie show that the nihilism of the ghetto leaves young Black males with few options. To have any kind of agency and escape poverty, they must resort to violence. While many critics have slammed both Wright and Biggie for the allegedly amoral dimension of their work, a closer examination shows that they have much in common with moralists such as Fyodor Dostoevsky who dramatized the spiritual cost of violence. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls commit to a belief in the transformational power of violence. While at first they appear to benefit from violence—Bigger discovers agency and feels on equal footing with Whites for the first time while Biggie amasses wealth and celebrity status—they both later experience a whirlwind of emotions. These fluctuations between despair and hope, anxiety and gratification, constitute a kind of suffering that humanizes them in a way that might bring discomfort to a mainstream American audience. Both the mob baying for Bigger’s blood and the negative reception and characterization of gangsta rap serve as evidence of American society’s reluctance to view young Black men as sentient human beings. It is much easier for most to paint a derogatory picture in black and white than to acknowledge complexity and nuance in these young men. Furthermore, any examination of poverty and crime that looks beyond young Black criminals and asks questions about society (as Max does in the famous courtroom scene in Native Son) would require an uncomfortable look in the mirror for America, with its dark history of racism and oppression. Native Son and Ready to Die demand just that. With their commitment to exploring both the darkness and light of the human soul, these works of art transcend matters of race, but they also ultimately serve as powerful reminders of the humanity of young Black men. A consideration of both works, side by side, also serves as fuel to the argument that ghetto life remains a societal problem untouched in the last half century. If he were alive today, Wright would no doubt recognize the plight of poor inner-city Blacks and appreciate Biggie Smalls, and other rappers like him, as activists who use art as their protagonists use violence. Gangsta rappers seek transformation and transcendence. They want the American Dream, just like you or I.