Garvey (2007)

Before Africa Unite, there was Garvey (August 28, 2007)

By Dream Hampton / BobMarley.com

Before Bob Marley became Jamaica's best-loved son and voice for Pan-African unity, there was Jamaican national hero Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
Born August 17, 1887 in St. Ann Parish to middle income parents, Garvey was organizing his fellow workers by the time he was 18. Like many early twentieth century Jamaican men, Garvey left his beloved island early and often, working on fruit and sugar plantations in Costa Rica, Panama and Colon. In search of work, Garvey joined his sister in London the summer of 1915. Inspired by his travels and convinced workers of African decent the world over were being discriminated against, he founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), the first Pan-African organization.

Garvey's dream of a Black Nation that would unite Africans on the continent with those spread throughout the Diaspora by slavery remains an important inspiration to the Rastafarian movement, including Bob Marley, who penned classic song, "Africa Unite." Garvey is credited for the red, black and green flag that symbolizes a Black Nation. His war cry, "Up you mighty people," lays the groundwork for Marley's most revolutionary thinking, his dreams of unity and self-sufficiency inform Marley's best writing, and his ideals form the foundation for Rita Marley's annual Africa Unite conference.

After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, an African-American leader who began Tuskegee Institute, Garvey sailed from England to the United States in 1916 to spread his message of African unity and self-determination. The organization grew rapidly and his weekly newspaper, Negro World began circulating a million copies across America. By 1919, Garvey's plan to begin a shipping business was realized with the establishment of The Black Star Line, a direct challenge to the White Star Line, the British shipping company whose most famous ship was the Titanic. The ship the UNIA purchased was christened S.S. Frederick Douglas after the 19th century abolitionist and orator. Money was raised in small donations, often nickels and dimes, donated by Negro World readers and UNIA supporters. The Black Star Line is often erroneously described as a boat that would return recently freed slaves "back to Africa." In fact, it was the beginning of the UNIA's entrepreneurship as there were plans to purchase additional ships and compete in the billion dollar fruit and sugar trade. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who, some fifty years later, would create COINTELPRO to disarm the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, led an investigation to have Garvey convicted of mail fraud and deported. Hence, Marley's lyrics in "So Much Things to Say:" "…they sold Marcus Garvey's rights…"

Garvey died June 10, 1940, at age 53, but his promise to posthumously continue the struggle for Pan-Africanism has proved prescient prescient ("Look for me in the whirlwind…I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have dies in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life."). His philosophy is the basis for thinkers as varied as Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed and Caribbean intellectual CLR James and continues to inspire everyone from rapper Mos Def to actor Danny Glover. The red, black and green flag he created is one color off from the adopted 19th century Ethiopian flag that has become synonymous with Rastafarians, but the colors carry the same meaning: the red is for the blood of the people, the green for the land, the black for Africa's children.

In 1964 Jamaica proclaimed Marcus Garvey its first national hero.

Prince (Ebony 2008)

Prince: The Early, More Dangerous Years (Ebony June 05, 2008)

It was 1999, the mega successful double album with the crossover smash “Little Red Corvette” that officially signaled Prince’s arrival as an innovative musical genius with killer pop instincts. But by 1982, when that chart-topping album was released, Prince had already changed the lives of his hardcore fans with four relatively obscure, intimate, experimental albums that forever transformed what was possible when it came to music, sex and sexuality.

Beginning with 1978’s For You, Prince, in what would come to be his typically prolific approach to recording, released an album a year. The self-titled Prince, with the R&B hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, Dirty Mind and Controversy, served sex as their main course.
Corrupting virgin brides, fetishizing incest among siblings, creating synth-symphonies in ode to the joys of oral, masturbation, parading a seemingly fluid sexuality, nothing was off limits. Prince didn’t struggle with the sacred and profane as binary forces to be celebrated or punished, he did a dizzying dervish dance until boundaries and divides disappeared in a sandstorm of pleasure.

Where the title song of 1999 was a protest of nuclear proliferation and Reagan’s Star Wars, Prince’s early interests were bedroom based. For You was the suite of an innocent in love, inspired by the ecstasy of commitment. In ‘78 there were rumors that his muse was the equally diminutive and prodigious phenom Patrice Rushen, that she in fact had taught him his way around a keyboard, perhaps even the recording studio itself. “Soft and Wet,” a rock ballad about anatomy and “Baby”, a quiet contemplation on unplanned pregnancy may or may not have been about his relationship with Rushen, but they invoked the crazy, sexiness of live-in new love.

He may have been musically immature, with chord restrictions and a reliance on the instrument du jour, the synthesizer, but Prince has never been as sweet as he was on his first album. He promises undying devotion and monogamy on songs like “My Love is Forever”, “I’m Yours” and “Just as Long as We’re Together.” 1979’s self-titled album Prince, which many of even his serious fans mistake as his debut, was a practical companion piece to his first album. Love begins to disintegrate, dreams of intimacy are dispersed with songs like ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me so Bad”, “Still Waiting” and “It’s Gonna Be Lonely.” He catches his lover in a bisexual tryst in “Bambi” (and discovers his inner guitar hero).

The following year, with the raunchy, sexually charged Dirty Mind, Prince seems to have vacated his spring awakening, love has dissolved and left him only with his erotica. The album opens “I was only 16/But I guess that’s no excuse/My sister was 32, lovely and loose/she don’t wear no underwear/she said it only gets in her hair/and it’s got a funny way of stopping the juice/My sister never made love to anyone else but me/she’s the reason for my sexuality…incest is everything it’s said to be.” You’d have to take it back to the Bible to find a more shocking verse in pop culture.

Though 1981’s Controversy begins with “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” a scolding about presidential Cold War standoffs, the album quickly hits the sheets. “Jack You Off”, “Let’s Work” and “Sexuality” let you know where Prince’s true passions lied. The sprawling, brilliant “Do Me Baby” a seven minute, ecstasy-inducing ballad (in as much as Prince was beginning to reinvent the “ballad”), ended Controversy, his fourth album and his final effort so focused on sex. He certainly didn’t abandon the erotic as a major theme, there are countless songs scattered throughout his thirty-year career that are as sticky as anything he recorded early on. But as his musical soundscape expanded, his worldview and interests matured, his themes became more multi-faceted and less focused on straight up sex (a good thing, I’m sure).

A reformed Jehovah’s Witness whose been known to talk strippers off poles in L.A. clubs so he can lecture them about Iran (true story), Prince won’t even perform most of the early, sexually charged songs. Prince in his early twenties may not even recognize the comparative prude he’s become. Still those early albums remain road maps to sexual exploration, freedom and ecstasy.

Jay Electronica (Ebony 2008)

Jay Electronica: New New Things (Ebony July 30, 2008)

Rock the Bells, the hip-hop summer tour, includes nostalgia (De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest reunion), politics (dead prez, Immortal Technique) and has Nas as its headliner (whose No. 1 debut on the charts supplanted L'il Wayne while selling 1/10th the amount of records as the ubiquitous Weezy). But the festival is nothing if not a national coming out for one of music's best kept secrets, Jay Electronica. The New Orleans native is a master m.c. who's been building his debut album in Detroit basements for the past couple of years. Gossip sites have outed him as Badu's latest baby daddy, but hip-hop heads who work and play on the internets have been giving him hugs since last fall, when he released five or six dozen genius bars over a loop from the score to Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (it appears on his myspace page as "The Pledge" without the 4 minute intro. by Just Blaze and Badu). After recovering from a shaky first big live show with Mos Def this spring at Nokia Theatre in New York, the god mc who samples the History Channel and renders Tesla comprehensible, is performing all new songs in his high school marching band uniform complete with spats (he played the French Horn) in a city near you. Check him out. He's a more muscular Nas, a smarter 50 Cent, the best mc since Hov, or all of the above. You decide.

Detroit garage is safe in the able, soulful hands of the great Jack White, even if he and fellow raconteur Brendan Benson did defect to Memphis, but if you want to dig deeper, you’ve go to check out The Dirtbombs one of punk’s best live bands evah. Lead singer and band founder Mick Collins could probably get in your home wearing a uniform from the cable company but onstage he explodes, morphing into a hard-working rock Ogun. The Dirtbombs always include classics from their full-length debut 1998’s Horndogs but come just as hard with new stuff from this year’s We Have You Surrounded. There’s nothing like seeing them live, so if you’re in shape and lucky, do so.

My sistas always wanna punch me in the face when I argue Foxy and Kim were as nice with the lyrics as Ms. Hill. But I’m tired of arguing over the 90s. And who says female mcs are history. Queens native Nicki Minaj stuffs her DDs in a bright pink bikini top and cops her best L’il Kim squat then proceeds to get super bossy on her banger Playtime is Over. I love a girl who does her own writing and like Ms. Hill, Nicki Minaj not only handles her own rhymes but has been known to lend her boys a few to hold. Like most girls with a television, Nicki believes sex sells, but it’s her skills that’ll earn your respect.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Spirits Up Above“ is covered with daring bravado by jazz vocalist Jose James. His equally fearless approach to Coltrane’s "Equinox" is straight up dazzling. Pieces of his brilliant new work are available on his myspace and will soon be available on an album he’s releasing later this year on legendary London based DJ Gilles Peterson’s new label, Brownswood. His cover of Freestyle Fellowship’s “Park Bench People” made me mist a little---maybe I hadn’t appreciated them like I should’ve in the early nineties. James treats them with the same respect as jazz giants. The Brooklyn-based vocalist and composer James is firmly rooted in classic jazz but goes where he wants. With his bellowing bassy alto and his perfect pitch he’s making his musical ancestral forefathers Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure proud.

Snitch (Ebony 2008)

Snitch: A Review of the Book by Ethan Brown (Ebony, April 14, 2008)

Boston based Antonio Ansaldi designed his Stop Snitching tees in 1999 because, he said at the time, prosecutor’s offices had fallen into the murky practice of using drug dealers testimony to trade their freedom for their co-defendants’, or just as common, using the police department to shut down competitors by informing. The shirts became a hood staple for the next five years, infuriating police, some community activists and dividing the hip-hop community, where pro and con essays were published on various hip-hop sites, blogs and in urban mags. The New York Times got involved and an unfortunate interview with Harlem rapper Cam aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes, where he insisted on sticking to the code, even if a hypothetical “serial killer” were his neighbor. Ethan Brown’s Snitch; Informers, Cooperators & the Corruption of Justice released early this year, raises the phrase from baggy Hanes tees and gives the complicated subject the serious treatment it deserves.

In his prologue Brown lays out his central thesis: the stellar investigative work the networks propagate with no less than a dozen police dramas (the Law & Order series, CSI et al) is more fantasy than fiction. Since the beginning of the disastrous War on Drugs, police work and consequently prosecutions, have relied not only heavily but often exclusively, on cooperators and informants. If the past decade and a half were a Law and Order episode we’d skip the first quarter, where the dicks rifle through garbage, bounce around the city’s neighborhoods interviewing ancillaries, until, like Hansel and Gretel, they end up at the doorstep of the criminal. Real life scenarios would cut straight to the interview room, where police who barely need step foot outside the station, threaten suspect after suspect (no need to lay out the criminalization of black youth and their suspicious births here, right?), until they “flip.”

Two powerful tools have acted as incentives for both prosecutors and the cornered suspect, Brown argues. One is the “5K” motion from a prosecutor which acknowledges “substantial assistance” was given by the accused. To be considered during sentencing it’s an incentive to suspects facing mandatory sentencing and skewed drug laws. The other is the Federal Rule of Evidence or Rule 404(b), which stipulates that prosecutors can introduce uncharged evidence relating “other crimes, wrongs or acts” to prove “motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident” behind a crime. Brown points out “…that “under Rule 404(b) prosecutors can introduce uncorroborated evidence relating to even serious crimes like murder.

“One result of punitive criminal justice policy such as mandatory minimums and prosecutors who’ve grown accustomed to relying on cooperator testimony is a high rate of wrongful convictions; a study by the Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions found that 46 percent of wrongful death penalty convictions can be attributed to false information provided by ‘incentivized witnesses.’ The anticrime bills have also created a skyrocketing federal inmate population.”

Brown traces the highly consequential practices to a single policy, The Anti-Drug Abuse Act OF 1988, which created a cabinet-level drug czar and improved upon its 1986 predecessor with five year mandatory minimums for possession of five grams of crack. Followed by a succession of anti-crime bills (where Bill Clinton convinced middling Republicans that he and the Democratic party were capable of cowboy tough), Brown goes on to prove that the present, privatized prison industry was the “anti-crime” policy’s inevitable future. “Perversely, the great achievement of the anticrime bills is the sprawling federal prison system itself. Direct expenditures on crime at the federal level doubled from 1990 to 1999 (from $10 billion to more than $20 billion) according to the Bureau of Justice statistics…. As the cooperation process is shrouded in secrecy by the feds, it’s difficult to discern the number of defendants who have struck cooperation deals.”

Brown progresses from policy and stats supported by hard facts to the anecdotal evidence of a half dozen narratives. These stories run the gamut---a Vietnam Vet in Iowa who trades in a Chicago bar owner when he is caught with a few kilos of cocaine; a guileless, small time ecstasy dealer who runs into an undercover DEA agent who sets him up to make the biggest buy of his career; a bookstore bust and even a patsy in the murder of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. Not the same jailhouse snitch that LA Times reporter Chuck Phillips relied on to implicate Sean Combs in Shakur’s non-fatal shooting, a story the paper had to officially retract two weeks later. But another cautionary tale that could just as well have served as an appendage to Snitch.

Combs slain superstar rapper, the late Notorious B.I.G. once rhymed “If you ain’t getting bagged/stay the fuck from police.” It seemed at the time a criminal code of conduct, a weak imitation of a glamorized Omerta or code of silence that may have only ever existed in movies about the mob. But with Snitch, Brown makes a case for the paranoia of the streets. In many ways it is an inherited position. While Brown keeps his argument tightly book ended by the crack era it wouldn’t be a reach to go back a generation. In the late sixties, after the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared war on Black revolutionaries in the shape of COINTELPRO. He vowed to “neutralize” the Black Panthers, whom he described as the “greatest internal threat” to national security.

Like a post 9/11 CIA desperate for Arabic speaking agents, counterintelligence was dependent on black spies, either sent in with an agenda, or “flipped” during the height of Hoover’s campaign. Using informants’ information, Panthers were being prosecuted across the country, or in the case of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton, murdered by police in his own apartment in the middle of the night as he lay sleeping with his pregnant wife. William O’Neil, the snitch who provided the police a layout of Hampton’s apartment was paid $300 for the lives of Hampton and his comrade Mark Clark. Conversely, grand jury resistors, affiliated with the Black Panther Party and later groups like the Black Liberation Army, refused to testify or cooperate in any way with the “state” and many spent years in jail for their silence. Huey Newton talked about setting up areas in the community that were safe spaces, free of prostitution and drug dealing. Fred Hampton brokered truces with Chicago’s most violent gangs to reduce the killing of innocents.

But the generations most affected by today’s police practices are not a generation with a movement. The so-called hip-hop generation got paid from selling mock resistance, from the myth of action. But it doesn’t make the assault on the community any less real and the human collateral damage, laid out plainly and unemotionally by Brown, is itself an indictment on the current criminal justice system.

Nina Simone (Ebony 2008)

Soul Influencer: Nina Simone (Ebony February 15, 2008)

There are two recordings by Nina Simone that seem to define her personal politics. The first, "Mississipi Goddamn" was a rage filled response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four Black girls were murdered. When she learned of the bombing, her first response was irrational. "I tried to make myself a gun! I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, I didn't care who it was." She told Lashonda Barret, author of I Got Thunder, decades later, it was her husband who talked her off the ledge.

Instead the lyrics for "Mississipi Goddamn" poured from her. She recorded the song live, before an adoring, and ultimately stunned audience at Carnegie Hall in March of 1964. Simone was fed up. Fed up with the high price of civil rights, fed up with what some, like Stokley Charmichael and Malcolm X, were coming to regard as the impotent response of the Southern based Civil Rights movement. "You keep on saying/Go Slow," she roared, as much to President Johnson as to the leaders she'd come to love and respect. As much as she supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (she'd donated many performances to fundraisers for the movement), by the end of Mississipi Goddamn her impatience with his Ghandi inspired, passive, non-violence had erupted. "This whole country is full of lies / You all gonna die, die like flies."

The second song is of course, the revenge fantasy "Pirate Jenny," co-authored by the radical Socialist playwright and theorist, Bertol Brecht. In his hands the lyrics signify the uprising of the silent, servant and working classes. In Nina Simone's hands the maid with a secret who scrubs the floor, is closer to the women in Battle of Algiers who smuggles bombs to the town square beneath her burqua. "You gentlemen can wipe off that smile off your face/Cause every building in town is a flat one/This whole frickin' place will be down to the ground."

The Black Power Movement had yet to be fully formed, but with her recording of "Pirate Jenny," Nina seemed to give them permission to bear arms, encouraged them to abandon the picketing and marching for something more covert, more underground, to respond to violence with violence. Ultimately, the confrontation exhausted her, the assassination of King in 1968 seemed to crush her hope of real resistance , of a full restoration of rights and humanity to Blacks in America. She made her way to West Africa, where she was welcomed like royalty, where she says, she felt no pressure to perform, no pressure to struggle. She ended up, like a few other important Black
artists from her generation, in France, though even there she didn't suffer fools lightly.

"How can anyone expect me to live in a country where our leaders are shot dead. I couldn't live here if I wanted to, because I have to stand up for my rights and those rights of Black people everywhere."

She didn't grow more optimistic about America with age, nor did her passion to struggle against injustice soften with age. "I don't like this country; I never did. America will sell her soul for money." Thanks to a set of reissues and compilations in late eighties, a new, American audience rediscovered her.

She inspired a new generation of singers and rappers like Lauryn Hill and Talib Kweli. In many ways she is the godmother to the fearlessness that the hip-hop generation considers its birthright. She's always been dismissive of the form, call it "not music at all," but it is her uncompromising and bold example that made Chuck D., Nas and Mos Def possible.

In the mid-90s she made headlines for shooting, through her window, two of her disruptive neighbors, with her bb gun. They were disturbing her peace. The current presidential election has exposed a long-existing generational divide; the old, Civil Rights guard dismissing Obama because he's "not ready." It doesn't take much to imagine Nina dressing her peers down for their backstepping, "you keep on saying/go slow!" Nina Simone, the indignant, the unpacified, the unrepentant, the unbowed.

Until her 2003 death in the South of France she was a symbol of defiance, a regal woman whose retreat from America was less defeat than a declaration that the country itself wasn't salvageable.

Bad Boy (Vibe 1999)

Bad Boy (From The Vibe History of Hip Hop, Three Rivers Press, 1999)

December 30, 1991
Uptown Records Conference Room

Lawyers are here. Puff’s mentor and boss Andre Harrell is here. As president and founder of Uptown Records, Andre has a lot invested in Sean “Puffy” Combs; he recently gave Puff the high-profile, high-pressure job of shepherding the embryonic careers of Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. Heavy D, Uptown’s only bonafide star, is here because he and Puff are friends – Hev put Puff on as an intern at Uptown, they’re both from Mount Vernon, and they co-sponsored the celebrity basketball two days earlier where nine people were trampled to death.

Puff is afraid that reading from index cards will seem disingenuous, so he’s trying to memorize the short speech he has prepared: “It has always been my dream to throw parties where young black people…” The basketball game at City College was supposed to end a year in which Puff’s parties – weekly events dubbed “Daddy’s House” at a midtown Manhattan club called the Red Zone – had grown mammoth, uniting the New York hip-hop community on a scale not seen since the legendary nights at Harlem’s Rooftop in the ‘80s. Andre tells him “dream” sounds too affected, too dramatic. Puff’s attorney Michael Warren–who will, years later, represent Tupac at his sexual assault trial– agrees.

“But I would say that wouldn’t I say that?” Puff searches for an understanding face at the table. He is only twenty-two. He is a dreamer, and drama – well, what exactly is too dramatic in these surreal few days?

The local press gathers at the St. Regis Hotel. They want to know how it can be that nine people, nine young black people, died, were stampeded trying to get into a basketball game. Puff and Hev have been awake all weekend trying to figure out how it happened. How to be responsible without bearing full responsibility. There was a lot of crying and pacing and phone calls; to lawyers, from friends, and finally to the families of the victims whose phone numbers they can find. Puff’s girlfriend, Misa, lost one of her good friends that night. The girl’s mother is inconsolable.

The night of the event, inside City College’s gym, when the panic threatened to create an even larger tragedy, when people around him were losing their heads, Puff scrambled from one unconscious victim to another, trying to resuscitate them. “I breathed in death,” he muttered as he paced Heavy D’s basement that night. “I felt it happen.”

The morning after the press conference, the New York Post blames the tragedy on a “Fool Named Puff Daddy.” In the article they call him a rapper. Puff and Misa come to pick me up from work at The Source. It is Misa’s birthday and she is still mourning her friend. She waits in the car and Puff comes up to the office. He stands in the hallway, outside the door, to avoid the magazine’s other editors, who are all working on a story about CCNY and him.

His eyes are swollen from lack of sleep. He talks about death threats; people claiming to be relatives of the victims have been calling his office all day. Andre wants him to stay away from the job he loves so much for a while. He mentions suicide. By the time this registers, though, he’s jumped back to the death threats. “But I feel protected. By God.” He opens his black ski jacket. “See, I don’t have anything on me, no guns, no vests. If they kill me, they kill me. It’s meant for me to die.”

Sean Combs’s success – and consequently, Bad Boy Entertainment’s – has always been marred by tragedy. After CCNY he began wearing a gold chain of Lazarus, the resurrected. The charm, flooded with pave diamonds, became symbolic of Puff’s own phoenix-like rise from the ashes. In the summer of 1992, Mary J.Blige’s "What’s the 411?” was released and it dominated the streets of New York, receiving the Jeep rotation reserved for hip hop. Mary was a raw force with an exceptional sound and a set of compelling contradictions: shy, a little rough, too trusting, mean. The marriage of who she was with the core hip hop beats Puff selected – whole bars from EPMD and Audio Two – was definitive.

Mary was accepted as the real thing, crowned the Queen of Hip Hop Soul, and Puff was considered her creator. New York buried the memory of CCNY. His peers in the music industry began to regard him with a combination of awe and envy. Hustlers in Harlem, who Puff had looked to for inspiration and sensibility, started emulating him. The weight of his links, the rims he chose, the way he wore his sweats (one leg up), the color his girl dyed her hair (honey blond, then white platinum) were all scrutinized and copied.

Bad Boy Entertainment’s image began innocently enough. Puff had his precocious godson photographed wearing size 10 ½ Doc Martens combat boots. The preschooler had one hand on his nuts and the other one pointed towards the sky. Still vice president of A&R at Uptown, Puff hired a street promotion team to litter the hip hop party scene with postcard-size flyers. On the back of the black and white photo was the announcement: THE GENERATION OF BAD MOTHAFUCKAS.

Puff became increasingly arrogant. He would stand in the office hallway with his shirt off and say things like, “Puff Daddy is my name as an artist, Sean Combs is my name for the movies.”

In July 1993, Andre Harrell fired him. I talked to Puff that night. He was stunned. “This nigga walked into my office saying ‘There can only be one lion in the jungle.’” He drove around the city in his new white BMW like a teenager who’d just been kicked out of his house, his Bad Boy business plan stuffed in the rear window, his makeshift staff, Uptown employees who had been splitting their duties, forced to choose sides.

When Puff introduces me to him, Big barely looks at me. He seems extremely shy. We are in Daddy-O from Stetsasonic’s basement studio. Big is here to add a few bars to the remix of Mary’s “Real Love”. It is his first real recording.

It is the summer of 1992. Biggie lives around the corner from me in Brooklyn, but I didn’t know him when, as an editor at The Source, I voted for his “Unsigned Hype” submission, a raw demo where he spat lyrics with authority over a Big Daddy Kane beat. But we will see each other every day after we meet, as he is, no matter the weather, posted on Fulton Avenue when I make my way to NYU each morning.

At 6’3” and a little more than 200 pounds, it’s hard to miss Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace. Plus there is always a small crowd around him. His little niggas. He is sharp and witty, hilarious and wickedly observant. People naturally gravitate toward him. They hold down the Chinese food spot, or the wall between the laundromat and the 24 hour, Jamaican-operated weed spot, and they smoke and joke a lot. Sometimes Biggie will bogle, or pay a girl a Snapple to do the Butterfly. Crackheads maintain a respectful distance till they catch some attention. They always acknowledge Big, throwing him a “Big Chris” and a quick toothless grin. Invariably one of the kids reaches into a brown paper bag stuffed in the crevice of the wall and blesses the addict with a white top.

When Puff was fired, Biggie sank into a deep depression. “I would have rather have never come out if I’m never gonna come out,” he said. His anthemic “Party and Bullshit,” from the Who’s the Man? soundtrack, was a club hit, and Puff put him on a half-dozen remixes within months of signing him to Uptown. A version of his album was almost finished. His girlfriend of four years, Jan, gave birth to a pretty baby girl, T’Yanna. Big paid friends to clean his room so he could wheel her bassinet next to his bed at night.

He and older brother figure Lance “Un” Rivera daydreamed aloud about future business plans. His best friend Damien was in and out of jail on a charge he caught defending his grandmother’s life. His mother’s breast cancer was always on his mind. And his entire neighborhood was counting on him to change their reality.

By the end of the year, though, the release date of Big’s album was nowhere in sight. Puff made one of his rare trips to Brooklyn one night and the three of us went to Junior’s restaurant. Over strawberry cheesecake, he assured Big that things were going to happen. That their dreams were going to come true. That setbacks are mere challenges and together they would be unstoppable. “I’m a visionary,” he said, leaning back into the circular red leather booth, decorated with Christmas lights. “You’ve got to trust me.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Bad Boy landed a home with Clive Davis’s Arista Records, and launched with Craig Mack’s Project: Funk the World. Then on September 13, 1994, the label released the Notorious B.I.G.’s landmark debut Ready to Die (copyright problems forced his official name change). And while Craig Mack’s single “Flava in Ya Ear” had claimed the summer, it was Big’s album that would shape Bad Boy’s success.

Dr. Dre’s The Chronic had an enormous effect on every rap album released after 1992. Previously, New York had shut out West Coast hip hop. N.W.A. was virtually ignored until Cube went solo. Too Short was practically unheard of. Ultramagnetic’s Tim Dog released a gimmicky single called “Fuck Compton” that was like a rallying cry during the summer of 1991.

Before, L.A. would put up with the insults. They couldn’t pretend they weren’t fans of New York hip hop – what else was there? But The Chronic presented L.A.’s languid rhyme style and murderous mentality as a challenge. And for almost two years, it’s superiority went uncontested. Until Ready to Die. It was in this sublime manner, long before it was articulated or fatally played out, that the East Coast – West Coast battle began to take form.

Puff had been aiming for a sense of album-length continuity with Jodeci and Mary when he was at Uptown. After Dre unleashed The Chronic, though, Puff understood exactly how cinematic 14 tracks could be. Mary’s sophomore My Life was Dre’s approach sampled and perfected; it was seamless. While Craig Mack, a producer and hip hop head from way back, shunned direction from Puff, Big depended on it.

With Ready to Die, Puff provided proscenium arches for Big’s lush narrative style. He required the album’s drama be tempered by a tone, that the action be present tense and vivid. He encouraged Big to rhyme slower and less forcefully. Like Kool G Rap, an early influence, Big’s autobiographically grafted protagonist was all criminal. Even his pitch had a violent quality; when Big said he was the illest, it didn’t sound like braggadocio, but like a stickup.

Like Slick Rick’s, Big’s form was a storytelling style replete with costars, characters created from his own alter ego: the second shooter in “Gimme the Loot,” the eavesdropping loyal homie on “Warning.” He contextualized the intergenerational schism created by the drug trade with songs like “Things Done Changed.” Suicide was the album’s metaphor for the widespread depression, despair, and hopelessness facing the kamikaze capitalists that New Yorkers simply dubbed hustlers.

The hypermaterialism of the drug game had been transported to hip hop by a new generation, and where sales may have been less important before, now they were everything. Wu-Tang had staged an aesthetic takeover of sorts – they’d at least wrestled New Yorkers from Dre’s hypnotic trance. But it would still be months before “C.R.E.A.M.,” their breakthrough hit, was released. And now New York had a new hip hop hero, Brooklyn’s first since Big Daddy Kane.

Unwittingly (and almost undetectably), with their classic albums, Biggie and Bad Boy and Dre and his label Death Row planted seeds that would marry their respective futures. Ironically, Big was always aware of West Coast hip hop, always a fan. (While I can claim introducing him to Too Short – I play him ragged, bootlegged copies of Freaky Tales early in our friendship; he loved the pornographic profanity – it was Big who illuminated some of the finer moments of N.W.A.’s most misogynist effort, Efil4zaggin.) The music affected his sensibility, making him listenable to L.A. fans where other New York rappers had failed.

In many ways, The Chronic and Ready to Die bridged coastal gaps, crossing each other’s audiences over. Dre’s genius as a producer was undeniable. New York’s legacy of brilliant lyricists descended on Biggie as if he were a cultural apex. Their influences were immeasurable. But when the tides changed, they would become binary markers.

The first week of November 1994, Puff threw himself a birthday party at Roseland ballroom. It was his first major party since the CCNY tragedy. He shamelessly repeated a videography of all his cameos on huge monitors. Tupac who was knee deep in a rape trial, attended. He and Biggie held court in the VIP lounge, popping bottles of Moet and smoking White Owls.

A few days later, Tupac was robbed and shot in the lobby of Quad Recording Studio. He recovered rapidly and his mother wheeled him into a court two days later to continue his trial. He was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced. He went to Rikers Island, then upstate to Clinton Correctional Facility. From prison, he granted VIBE an interview that implicated Biggie, Puff, Andre Harell, even his best friend Stretch, who was robbed the night of the shooting. With real conviction, he asserted that his friends either had knowledge of or involvement in his shooting. Stretch had warned Big that ‘Pac was “flippin’ from stress.” But Big was unprepared for the accusations, the fallout, and, more important, the media circus that ensued.

At the Hit Factory recording studio, after reading an advance copy of the story, Puff huddled with Big. “We say nothing,” he told Big. “Niggas come up to you, start questioning you, reporters start asking you shit…nothing. Complete silence.” Big shrugged in agreement. The whole thing had thrown him into a state of disbelief. “Man…whatever. What is there to say?”

And so it went. Bad Boy had no comment. ‘Pac’s accusations grew louder. Suge Knight, cofounder of Death Row Records began listening. Knight—who blamed Puff for the murder of one of his associates at a party in Atlanta--offered Tupac a record deal (Tupac was already signed to Death Row’s parent company, Interscope) and posted his bail. Tupac began a public assault on Bad Boy and Biggie. Puff and Big kept silent. Bad Boy released three R&B albums; from Total, 112, and finally from Big’s immensely talented wife, Faith. They all sold well.

Big stacked up his own share of criminal cases: He was accused of breaking the jaw of a promoter who tried to stiff him, beating a “fan” with a baseball bat in front of the Palladium, and illegal possession of firearms. His marriage disintegrated. His protégé group Junior M.A.F.I.A. launched Undeas Records, the company he and his partner Un formed. Lil’ Kim, with whom Big was romantically involved, shone. He began building a home for his mother in the Poconos.

When Big arrived in Los Angeles for the 1996 Soul Train Awards, there was no representative or car from Bad Boy or Arista at the airport. It was the first indication to Big’s core group of friends, Un and his niggas from Brooklyn, that they would have to take Big’s safety in their own hands. The heated atmosphere was palpable. Big and Puff and Faith performed a medley of hits at the show wearing all white. ‘Pac stormed the aisle during the performance wearing fatigues. He had a small army with him. He and Big came face to face backstage for the first time since ‘Pac's conviction in 1994. “That’s when I knew it was real to him,” Big said later. “That he believed all this shit. Duke was just convinced.” ‘Pac and Lil’ Cease from Junior M.A.F.I.A. threw insults at each other. A gun was fired. Then another one. The crowd dispersed.

‘Pac released the most scathing dis record in hip hop history, a B-side titled “Hit Em Up,” in which he called Big a “fat mothafucka” and yelled, “I fucked your wife!” Privately, Big became weary of it all. “The fucked up shit is that instead of my music, the shit I accomplished, I’m gonna be remembered for this dumb shit.”

But it was Tupac whose life felt the impact first. On September 6, 1996, he was shot in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson fight. Seven days later, he died. It was truly astonishing—Tupac embodied the myth of the real nigga, an indestructible construct (“Real Niggaz Don’t Die”) created during one of the most violent periods in Black history. And Pac was resilient. He had walked between bullets and, when hit, away from them.

I called Big the day after Tupac’s death and asked him how he felt. “Shocked.” Would he consider attending a funeral if there was one to, you know, bury the beef? “Nah, man. This nigga—he just made my life miserable. Ever since he came home. He told lies, fucked with my marriage, turned fans against me. For what?”

At the time of Pac’s death Big was recuperating from a car accident. Lil’ Cease had crashed his Benz into a freeway median. Big's girlfriend Tiffany, whom he’d met after a concert in Philly the summer of ’95 (Faith had recently given birth to their son Chris, but they were still estranged), broke her ankle. Big had broken his femur and was unable to walk and entered extensive rehabilitation therapy at the same center where Christopher Reeve had been. Two months later, in a wheelchair, he flew to Los Angles to appear in the video for Puff’s first single as an artist, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” Suge Knight, Puff’s nemesis, was in jail for parole violation. And though Puff said publicly that he was simply in Los Angeles for the better film production quality, it was not lost on anyone, least of all L.A. rap fans, that his mere presence was the declaration of a quiet victory. A local DJ, Julio G, came to the set to do an interview with Big and Puff. They were diplomatic and sincere when they acknowledged Pac’s loss.

In January 1997, Big returns to L.A. on crutches to work on Puff’s debut album. He is in high spirits. He talks about his new son a lot. Advance copies of his new double album arrive on compact disc from Bad Boy’s offices in New York. He plays it loudly in his rented Suburban. On March 8, he attends a party following the Soul Train Awards, at which he was a presenter. Leaving the party in the Suburban, on Fairfax and Wilshire, he is gunned down. Damien and Cease are in the car; Gee a friend from Brooklyn, is driving. Puff, a few cars ahead, hears the shots and runs to the truck. Big dies before they can drive him the half-mile to Cedars Sinai Hospital.

A private funeral is held on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Puff speaks. Faith sings. Big’s mother reads from the Book of Job. Un and Damien and his man L are pallbearers. Big’s crew—officially called Junior M.A.F.I.A., but really just very young men from Fulton Street who loved him—hold one another up in the standing room area at the back of the parlor. A motor procession drives through Brooklyn, up the block where Big was raised, St. James Place, and down Fulton Avenue. It feels as if all five boroughs have gathered in Brooklyn for his farewell, grown men openly weeping in the streets, then spontaneously and collectively singing his newest hit, Hypnotize.

Two weeks later, Damien, Cease, Gee and I are in front of Big’s old apartment on St. James. We pour some cognac on the makeshift altar his neighbors and fans have erected. We sit in front of the building in Big’s new customized Suburban. It is completely bullet-proof and there is a stash box big enough for .45 Ruger. It was to be shipped out to Los Angles three days after Big was shot. Life After Death rocks the truck back and forth. The skit that proceeds “Going Back to Cali” comes on. “You know this was playing when it happened, right?" Damien tells me. He doesn’t dwell on the irony. He fast-forwards to the next track.

Big’s second album, Life After Death, was released just three weeks after his murder, It is a staggering achievement. In the beginning Big had been hungry, for fortune more than fame. He wanted to be rich. With Puff, he achieved that, and in many ways his life changed drastically. He went from having no car to owning four. He bought a condo in Teaneck, New Jersey, and moved his friends in. Through J.M. he provided an opportunity for everyone who meant something to him from his neighborhood to change their lives.

But fame had been something else. It had turned against him, or more accurately, it had been turned against him. He felt betrayed in the most basic sense by Tupac—as undoubtedly Tupac must have felt about him when he began to believe the stories he was being told.

Life After Death was an examination of that betrayal, notoriety, excess, and greed. Big’s narratives were still firmly couched in the autobiographical tradition, his first person protagonist still our generation’s everyman, the drug dealer. That hustler still thoroughly invested in the myth of the real nigga, the myth of action. But the album is in every way evolutionary. Formally, Big exercised practically every existing flow pattern. And on songs that appear quite basic at first, like the first single “Hypnotize,” he even experimented with brand-new verbal styles.

He had achieved perfection with a remix of “One More Chance” on Ready to Die, and on his sophomore effort he extended that perfection with “Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Niggas Bleed” and “Somebody’s Gotta Die.” Amazingly, words and intricate narratives like “I Got a Story to Tell” were never committed to paper; the autodidactic practice of composing whole songs in his head had become for him, effortless. Sonically, the album was even more cinematic than the first: full, rich and three-dimensional.

Big had never learned to separate himself from his narrative, to inject self-criticism. But if his and Tupac’s lives were sacrifices, then the lessons to be garnered, the history that’s documented, will be transmitted through the immediacy of their lyrics. It is this legacy---of a generation racing toward the millennium with all of the century’s loaded symbols, its technology, its maddening war on young Black bodies and our often inadequate response to that assault—that will be passed on.

A month after the funeral, I visit Puff at his recording studio in midtown Manhattan, Daddy’s House. There are rumors floating around that he might take a sabbatical from the music industry, postpone or cancel plans to release the solo album he’d been working on in L.A., then titled Harlem World. “There’s so much to say—but what is there to say," he says. I look at my boots, then at the walls in the office of the studio and the platinum plaques on the wall. “I don’t know…I think about suicide a lot.” I look at the healed scars on his wrists, rumored to be an attempt but actually just the nasty marks from a shattered champagne bottle that got tangled in his bracelet and lodged in his veins. That arm is cold to touch and, he says, often numb. “But not really, not in that kind of way…You know, not like I’m going to do it…”

I know he won’t. And as I walk back to my hotel room it occurs to me that not only will he move forward and release the album, eventually titled No Way Out, but that he will also become a huge star. That he will release the album he is in the studio to mix, by The Lox. That it too will be a hit and Bad Boy will keep making hits—as it turns out, by a slow-talking rapper named Mase and by Puff’s producing everybody from Lil” Kim to Mariah Carey. That puff will break and set records. That he will realize his dream to make and star in films. That while drama like his alleged assault of Bass manager Steve Stoute, will follow him, he will continue to invoke the kind of envy that can become violent and that he will be emulated until the day he dies.

I think, as I walk, that he must have paid some great kamic debt, in some distant lifetime, to walk in and out of deep darkness and blinding light (and that it will be that way for this whole life), to be so protected by angels.

March 9, 1997
Los Angeles

My phone rings. It is after midnight and I am sleeping. I think it might be Biggie. He always calls late. But it is not. It is someone telling me that Biggie was shot, that he might be dead. I hang up on the person. Someone else calls. They tell me Biggie is indeed dead. I hang up on them too. But I call Puff. His cell phone is turned off. It is never turned off.

I feel the first signs of panic. I call my best friend in L.A. and she makes it to my house in Silver Lake in a matter of minutes. We drive to Cedars Sinai, where she heard he has been taken. In front of the emergency room is the Suburban he’d rented. There is police tape around it and a tightly formed pattern of bullet holes in the passenger dor, where Big would have been sitting.

The panic is real now. I call his best friend Damien. A girl answers the phone, tells me it’s true. Damien is with Faith at her hotel and he’ll meet me at Big’s hotel room. He has to make all the hard phone calls. To Un and L and Kim in New York, to Big’s girl Tiffany in Philly. To Big’s mom.

‘This nigga, who ain’t never hurt nobody,” Damien keeps saying. “I could see if it was one of us.” Cease stares out the window, unable to speak or move. In a few hours he will put his arm through the window and stitches will be required to close the wound. “One fucking bullet.” That’s how it happened. There were no last words. “I been shot mad times—niggas get shot.” Damien sounds as if he were up pacing the room, but he’s sitting on the couch, his head in his hands, exhausted. On his right arm is the psalm that Big had tattooed in the same spot a week earlier.

The hotel room is covered with Big’s clothes. Custom-made Versace, The gator loafers he bought when he came to Detroit. Big’s mother is on her way to the airport in Queens. Un is driving her. T’Yanna’s mother Jan and Mann from the neighborhood are accompanying her on the flight. She hears on the early-morning radio what she would not allow herself to believe when Damien called. The sun is beginnig to rise in Big’s hotel room. Damien needs to sleep but promises he will not, nor will he shower, until “I get my man out this motherfucker.”

When Mrs. Wallace lands at LAX it is scorching. She thinks L.A. is the cruelest, most awful place on the planet. She vows never to return, “except to look my son’s murderer in the face. To ask him ‘Why?’”

“This nigga died from one ass bullet,” Damien keeps repeating as if trying to find logic in the details of the absurd. Cease stares at the rising sun. Damien tilts his head back on the couch, covers his eyes with one arm, and lets his tears flow. “One ass bullet.”

Beyonce (Giant Magazine 2008)

Beyonce: Portrait of a Lady (Giant Magazine, 2008)

by dream hampton

She Is…A World-Class Entertainer

“You have to understand,” Jay-Z told me in 2003, before Beyonce’ was his wife, when they were still getting to know each other, while they were negotiating their relationship with the public. “I don’t even like for people to know what my girl looks like…and now I’m in a relationship with Michael Jackson!”

At the time, it wasn’t clear if Jay had a case of love goggles. Sure, led by Beyonce’, Destiny’s Child had hit the stratosphere in 2001, picking up Grammys, breaking Billboard records and churning out fun, girl-power R&B dance hits. (They wouldn’t be named bestselling girl group of all time until 2005, after they’d reunited in 2004 to record Destiny Fullfilled). But MJ? The greatest of all time? This was when you couldn’t read an article on the group without Beyonce’ being described as “bootylicious.”

Midway through 2003, of course, she’d release her solo debut, Dangerously in Love, and that’s when I, for one, became a believer. I was in the studio with her future husband one night when she arrived, by herself and by cab, to his session. He was laying down his denouement, The Black Album, and, as is his custom when he is recording, was in need of a haircut. She was wearing a $1200 pair of jeweled Jimmy Choos, black, cropped nylon track pants and a fitted white tank top. She was smaller, yet taller, in person and as beautiful without makeup as she’d ever been in photo spreads. Her heart-shaped face was small enough to fit into one of Jay’s hands. She flashed her disarmingly warm smile when we met. When I said something funny, I learned she has this adorable habit of closing one eye when she laughs, like it’s stuck in a wink. A Beyonce’ hater I could never be. She offered an impromptu listening session of her solo CD when I asked about its progress, and I was, quite simply, blown away.

The single she was considering, “Crazy in Love,” hinted at her Mike-like pop instincts, but meandering sexy ballads such as “Yes” and “Speechless,” with Shuggie Otis samples and Prince-inspired open-ended vocal arrangements, were completely unexpected—a departure from the syncopation and tightly choreographed radio hits of Destiny’s Child. I played Dangerously as much as My Life by Mary J. Blige. It was like Mary’s sophomore album inverted. Instead of a twenty something in the throes of pain, Beyonce’ writhed in ecstasy. The closing song, “Daddy,” let us know what little girls could become if they were never abandoned, but loved right, encouraged and protected from the beginning.

Each show in support of that album was a revelation. For the 2003 BET Awards in June, she rocked “Crazy in Love” in the silk halter mini dress from the video and performed a dangerous live version of the “Uh Oh” dance. Jay had her back, emerging on stage to spit a few bars on their biggest collabo.

She didn’t mean to do it, just like she never meant to outshine her Destiny sisters, but that night other R&B singers disappeared.

She bodied the MTV Video Music Awards that August, arriving upside down in a harness and harem pants to perform “Baby Boy.”

It was clear that with Beyonce’ we were witnessing something we’d never quite seen before in pop. She didn’t have the range of Mariah, but she had considerable chops. She didn’t go for the perfect, big, back-lot choreography of Janet, but she was a committed, passionate dancer. She had the focus and drive of a professional athlete. She was as much a feminist as Michael Jackson was a black militant, but she was clearly a womanist, demanding respect in her songs. She was old-school glamorous, whether in sequined boy shorts her mom had sewn around her thick thighs or in Cavalli chiffon, performing at halftime at the NBA All-Star Game and bending the couture gown to her bodacious body’s will. She connected with her peers, giving young girls something to aspire to, the same way the biggest rap stars served the boys. At Motown 25, Michael Jackson’s historic performance cemented his legacy as one of the world’s greatest performers in a single night. But in a six-month run kicked off by awards season, Beyonce’ delivered half a dozen epic performances.

The same February night Janet had her infamous nip slip at the 2004 Super Bowl, Beyonce’ flawlessly belted the national anthem in a cream pantsuit with belled sleeves and made her hometown of Houston proud of its rising superstar.

Weeks later, she murdered the 2004 Grammys by collaborating with her longtime production designer Kim Burrell to stage a bit of modern dance and mini framed theater as she unpacked the album’s technically complicated title song, “Dangerously in Love 2.” Parading her perfect pitch, her powerful Wagnerian mezzo-soprano voice, she climbed three and a half octaves in the ballad she’d penned as a tenth-grader, scaling from a low C to a high E. A white dove landed in her outstretched hand as she completed her landmark performance. When the cameras cut to the audience, Prince was on his feet, rapt in a roaring standing ovation.

“During rehearsals the bird had flown right into my hair. I had an up-‘do that I guess looked just like a nest to him,” she says today, sitting in a Manhattan hotel suite, a few blocks from the penthouse apartment she shares with Jay. “So we put this rhinestone in my palm because they love shiny things…I stretched the end of that song a good ten seconds so that dove would come to me!”

The evening had begun just as memorably. She opened the show partnering with Prince for a Purple Rain medley. The timeless, mysterious legend lending his endorsement to pop’s next great. “I’ve had shows where I performed with a broken heel, or when I went into a back bend and tried to catch-and missed- Jay’s belt buckle during ‘Déjà Vu’ at the BET Awards…but that night with Prince, I was in a trance,” she explains. “I don’t remember anything after I walked through the smoke onstage. I was definitely Sasha that night, completely free.”

She Is…A Daughter

“I met Sasha when Beyonce’ was six years old at her first performance at St. Mary’s Elementary talent show,” her daddy, Mathew Knowles, remembers. “She was competing with fifth-and sixth-graders.”

“She got on that stage and became a different person,” Tina Knowles agrees. “My husband and I looked at each other like, ‘Who is that?’”

On the night of the first official listening session for her third solo album, it was Mr. Knowles who had the job of introducing Beyonce’/Sasha to an audience of music journalists high on free sushi. It was the kickoff to Beyonce’ season, and Mathew Knowles, president and CEO of Music World Entertainment, his daughter’s label home, was unveiling the double concept album I am…Sasha Fierce, I am…Beyonce’.

Incredibly, in the cynical eyes of Beyonce’s haters, even her relationship with her parents is suspect. Mathew Knowles is cast as a modern-day Joe Jackson, minus the boys and the abuse. And Tina as a controlling southern doyenne who lives out pageant dreams through her oldest daughter. The truth is a little less exciting. I’ve visited, with Jay, their home in Houston. It was decorated with the tasteful restraint of upper-income black folks who’ve had money for decades: Cosby Show-like figurative black art framed around a white baby grand piano and an enormous chef’s kitchen that led to a patio, a pool and a barbeque pit. The entire spread sat on a lake. Over ears of blackened corn, cousin Angie told us that a storm had hit the area the night before and an alligator ended up in the neighbor’s pool. Solange, who at the time was asserting her independence with a curly, chopped, natural ‘do, watched as her teacup dog, Sugie, lost a wrestling match with a stuffed bear. Beyonce’ shared a reclining patio chair with Jay, and Tina and Mathew Knowles took turns at the gas grill.

Mathew Knowles was a Xerox salesman when his eldest daughter came to him with dreams of becoming a singer. He was by no means Will Smith’s character in The Pursuit of Happyness. “I was the top salesman worldwide," he says of this time. “I was fortunate to have a six-figure income, and my wife had a seven-figure income with the hair salon. So we didn’t need our kids to make money. We still don’t. When Beyonce’ came to me saying this was her dream, I was already planning to move into the music industry. My first artist was a Houston rapper named Lil’ O. I got him signed to MCA. Destiny’s Child was the second group I signed.”

Still, the image of Knowles as a drill sergeant who made his daughter and her friends run laps around the local park in high heels and practice until they passed out persists.

“As a supportive father of my kids, if they’d said, ‘Daddy, I want to be a doctor,’ my response would’ve been, ‘Work hard, get your medical degree, and when you’re finished, I’ll buy a hospital for you.”

It’s enough to trigger the primal envy of every fatherless girl who has ever craved unconditional daddy love. I suggest as much to Tina, whom I catch on the phone in between fittings at her Manhattan House of Dereon office. I tell her that there’s the perception that Beyonce’ has lived an incredibly protected life and been passed from her father’s home to her husband’s.

“I don’t dispute that she’s lived a protected life. People think that I’m the one who’s telling her, ‘Don’t do this, and don’t do that.’ I was always trying to get her to go out, socialize,” says Tina. “I tried to drop her and Kelly [Rowland] off at parties, and they didn’t want to go in—they wouldn’t even get out the car! Beyonce’ begged me to go back home to the studio. That’s just who she’s always been."

“When Kelly and Beyonce’ were twelve or thirteen, they met [R&B group] SWV when they were in Houston, and those girls took them under their wing….They’d pick them up, take them to shows. [SWV member] Lelee pulled me aside—she was only seventeen, eighteen years old herself—and she said, “Ms. Knowles, stay with them because I have seen things and been in positions with older men and whatnot that I should never been in.’ After that, I realized I had to be there, and I don’t apologize for protecting her as a girl in this business. But who Beyonce’ is as a person has protected her more than anything. Even now, when I hear some of the things that are said about my family, I get into mama-bear fight mode. But Beyonce’ is more methodical. She decides what to react to and what to ignore. I’ve actually learned a lot from her because I’m from Gavelston [Texas]…a country girl. I fight.”

She is...an Actor

It was her mother whom Beyonce’ turned to when she was offered the role of the great blues singer Etta James in the film Cadillac Records. “I thought she could do this,” says Tina, “be someone who was totally different than who she is…Etta was the bad girl, the tough one…I thought she could kill it. She was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it…I don’t know if I have the time.’ I said, ‘Well, you said you wanted to do something dark and different.”

“She was the dream to play Etta. I wrote it for her,” says the film’s director, Darnell Martin. “Beyonce’ has a quality where you want to protect her. There’s a feeling of deep sensitivity and, as cliché’ as it may sound, of goodness. So when you start with that, the character becomes accessible as opposed to someone who already reeks of addict. She started with this incredible innocence, but she went there, down to the rawest place. I told her, ‘I need you to gain weight for this.’ And she did it. She had her mascara running. Her makeup was messed up. The glamour was gone, and it was just a woman addicted to heroin.”

To prepare for what, up to this point, is the role of her lifetime, Beyonce’ visited the Brooklyn location of Phoenix House, an addiction-recovery treatment facility that offers programs in nine states. The plan was to sit in a circle with the women for 60 minutes. Four hours later Beyonce’ was still in the therapy session, completely transformed.

“In the beginning I didn’t want to offend anyone and ask too personal questions,” she says of the visit. “But a few hours into it, it was just real talk….The saddest thing was when they talked about their children. There was a lot of crying. They talked about their lows—the lowest things they did for drugs—and the stories of their lives before they became addicted. It was just one tragedy after another so that I understood how they came to be addicted.”

“The women were so moved,” says Karen Sodomick, VP of communications for Phoenix House. “She made them so comfortable. She came in with no entourage, and her comfort level and her openness created a warm, safe environment for the women. She sat there and was sincerely interested. At one point she had to leave the room and regroup. For those women it was a great reminder that they’re not disposable. She and her mom suggested cosmetology for our skills-training program. We’re working with them now to make it happen.”

Martin says that Beyonce’ donated her salary from the film to Phoenix House. “I just can’t say enough good things about Beyonce’, about her family,” Martin says. “This film would not have been made without her. The incredible thing is she went from a grueling six-day shoot, and the next week she was in the papers getting married.”

She is...a Wife

For us spectators, their affair began in pictures. In the south of France, in the summer of 2002, their first real date was captured by paparazzi. Yachting on the Mediterranean in the early summer months became their annual ritual. And even though the paparazzi showed up just as religiously, the couple took a vow of silence.

“We made a decision then to remain private about it,” Jay says. “There are only a couple stories for the tabloids to write: ‘They’re A Couple!’ ‘They’re Married!’ ‘They’re Divorced!’”

The wedding was inevitable and happened six years later on April 4 at Jay’s Tribeca penthouse. An online gossip vampire published the address, and the paps circled like buzzards, snapping arriving guests such as Gwyneth Paltrow, but no wedding pictures ever ended up in the rags. There was no public confirmation, until six months later, that the private ceremony even happened.

One of the most telling details about the wedding was the absence of decadent catering. Tina Knowles and Jay’s grandmother lovingly prepared the couple’s favorite dishes. “We cooked all the food,” says Tina proudly. “I cooked all my Creole stuff, and his grandmother cooked her oxtails. My favorite part was when we put all of this home cooking on that fancy china. It was special.”

My money is on their success. Jay doesn’t often make mistakes, and B is a pragmatist.

“Watching my parents, I learned that marriage isn’t a fantasy,” Beyonce’ tells me. “My parents are tighter now than ever, but they’ve been through it all. There were times they were together, times when they were apart. I learned that it’s a lot of hard work, that it’s more than a dress.”

She is...an Icon

A dozen years at the top of the game, three solo albums in, more than 60 million records sold, every music award collected, Beyonce’ was recently quoted as saying that she wants to graduate from pop star to icon—like Tina Turner, who she famously shimmied with at the 2008 Grammy Awards and whome she often appears to channel onstage. Giorgio Armani—he who pals around with iconic siren Sophia Loren—cast Beyonce' as a 21st-century Marilyn Monroe in the campaign for his fragrance Emporio Armani Diamonds and considers the elevated status a done deal.

“Beyonce’ is a modern-day icon combining so many talents with soul and style,” says Armani. “There is no one today who transcends music, film and fashion in the way that she does.”

Beyonce’ is the biggest pop star in the world. But for all her fame, fortune and success, her humanity remains untouched. “A lot of people don’t realize Beyonce’ was sixteen years old when her first number-one record came out,” says Mathew Knowles. “And all these millions of records later and trophies…What I’m most proud of is what a good person she is, how she’s as good to the janitor in the hallway as she is to the president behind the desk. For me, that’s what matters.”