Notorious B.I.G. - Warning
*** (of four)
My favorite Biggie song of all time - well, all three albums - is this tale of a hustler being woken up ("Who the fuck is this / Pagin' me at 5:46 / In the morning / Crack'a dawnin' / Now I'm yawnin' / Wipe the cold out my eye / See who's this pagin' me and why") to be told by a friend that some dudes the hustler used to party with have found out he's rich and are coming to get him. To stick him for his paper.
The song of course ends with Biggie bragging about his arsenal of weaponry and fleet of Rottweilers ("And I feed 'em gunpowder / So they can devour / The criminals / Try'na drop my decimels"). The guys try to break in, and each spots a red dot on the other's forehead just before Biggie pulls the trigger.
The end part is left out of the PG-rated, MTV-ready video, though, you can be sure. In fact, Biggie re-recorded the vocals with friendlier euphimisms for murder, racial slurs and drugs, but a dozen or so words - and an entire sentence - still doesn't make the cut. (Among them: "Windpipe.") The new chorus, "Why they wanna stick me for my paper," rings particularly awkward.
The Hype Williams video, too, is disappointing. Oh, it's opulent and letterboxed and blinged to the gills, but it's a literal visual depiction of the song. Which means, we see Biggie waking up - yes, shirtless, and bookended by a pair of hot females - to take a phone call, while Puffy delivers the news from his hot tub while swinging around an open bottle of Cristal. Then Biggie processes this info and issues his response while - as the video progresses - sitting in his dry sauna, eating a bowl of Peanut Butter Crunch*, brushing his teeth and hunching behind his office desk while Puffy's on the other end of the phone, driving around the city with his top down.
The "red dot on your forehead" sequence, which served as closure to the song, is gone, and in the PG world of MTV, there's not much Hype can do to dress up what essentially is the same old rap shit - emphasis on property, gambling, drinking, hot women. And you see a lot of Biggie boob and gut. Which doesn't help.
What could have been an avant garde, Pulp Fiction-esque bringing to life of some sparkling hip-hop prose and storytelling ("There's gonna be a lotta slow singin' and flower bringin' if my burglar alarm starts ringin'") is a standard big-budget video with no conclusion. Still better than most of the shit around, though, so it gets the three-star rating.
* = Logo blurred by MTV, of course. You know, it's odd to learn at the age of 27 that Notorious B.I.G.'s favorite breakfast cereal is my favorite childhood breakfast cereal, although unlike me, he probably didn't spend the rest of the day whining about how the tan-colored balls of sugar and starch cut the shit out of the roof of his mouth.
My favorite Biggie song of all time - well, all three albums - is this tale of a hustler being woken up ("Who the fuck is this / Pagin' me at 5:46 / In the morning / Crack'a dawnin' / Now I'm yawnin' / Wipe the cold out my eye / See who's this pagin' me and why") to be told by a friend that some dudes the hustler used to party with have found out he's rich and are coming to get him. To stick him for his paper.
The song of course ends with Biggie bragging about his arsenal of weaponry and fleet of Rottweilers ("And I feed 'em gunpowder / So they can devour / The criminals / Try'na drop my decimels"). The guys try to break in, and each spots a red dot on the other's forehead just before Biggie pulls the trigger.
The end part is left out of the PG-rated, MTV-ready video, though, you can be sure. In fact, Biggie re-recorded the vocals with friendlier euphimisms for murder, racial slurs and drugs, but a dozen or so words - and an entire sentence - still doesn't make the cut. (Among them: "Windpipe.") The new chorus, "Why they wanna stick me for my paper," rings particularly awkward.
The Hype Williams video, too, is disappointing. Oh, it's opulent and letterboxed and blinged to the gills, but it's a literal visual depiction of the song. Which means, we see Biggie waking up - yes, shirtless, and bookended by a pair of hot females - to take a phone call, while Puffy delivers the news from his hot tub while swinging around an open bottle of Cristal. Then Biggie processes this info and issues his response while - as the video progresses - sitting in his dry sauna, eating a bowl of Peanut Butter Crunch*, brushing his teeth and hunching behind his office desk while Puffy's on the other end of the phone, driving around the city with his top down.
The "red dot on your forehead" sequence, which served as closure to the song, is gone, and in the PG world of MTV, there's not much Hype can do to dress up what essentially is the same old rap shit - emphasis on property, gambling, drinking, hot women. And you see a lot of Biggie boob and gut. Which doesn't help.
What could have been an avant garde, Pulp Fiction-esque bringing to life of some sparkling hip-hop prose and storytelling ("There's gonna be a lotta slow singin' and flower bringin' if my burglar alarm starts ringin'") is a standard big-budget video with no conclusion. Still better than most of the shit around, though, so it gets the three-star rating.
* = Logo blurred by MTV, of course. You know, it's odd to learn at the age of 27 that Notorious B.I.G.'s favorite breakfast cereal is my favorite childhood breakfast cereal, although unlike me, he probably didn't spend the rest of the day whining about how the tan-colored balls of sugar and starch cut the shit out of the roof of his mouth.
posted by daytime at 4:11 AM
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