The Comment Factory

Ten years ago today, a young man named Lamont Coleman was shot dead on the corner of 139th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York City. Lamont, known to most of the world by his rap moniker “Big L,” stood on this same corner in the cover photo of his debut album, Lifestyles ov da Poor and Dangerous. He was only 24 years old when he died, but by then, he was already a Harlem hip-hop legend.

Those familiar with the East Coast hip-hop scene know that Big L is widely regarded as one of its titans — an originator, one that raised the bar to a level that few have been able to touch since. Although L was one of the most talented rappers in New York, he had nowhere near the fame of household names like Tupac Shakur of the Notorious B.I.G.* The biggest break of his career, a deal with Jay-Z’s Rock-a-Fella record label, was set to happen less than a week after he died.**

Big L’s legendary status is well deserved: in his songs, each syllable connected to one another so well that the whole song became one flowing, charged rope of expression. His rhymes were clever, original, and hilarious; his delivery brimmed with confidence and power that seized you by the windpipe and made you listen. When he shared the mic with a group of fellow rappers, he utterly dominated it – I imagine members of his crew had to draw straws to decide who would have to go after L. Not to mention that L was blessed with having a vocal timbre that seemed made for hip-hop.

To try and do justice to L’s cleverness and flow, I’ve included a few lyrical excerpts below:

I’ll bend a rapper like a fender
I’m slender
But far from tender
Killing niggaz like a Klan member

Breakin’ in cribs with a crow-bar
I wasn’t poor, I was ‘po’
I couldn’t afford the ‘o-r”

I’m so ahead of my time,
My parents haven’t met yet

Although L’s prose was a breath of fresh air, the subject matter of his songs was pretty standard rap fare – growing up on the mean city streets, being wary of gold-digging women, trying to “get money.” There was one exception, early in his career. Many rappers claimed to be violent, but L was radically so, widening the arena of violence past the traditional boundaries of standard street-thug warfare to the realm of macabre “Satanic shit.” L was one of the early proponents of “horrorcore” school of rap; his song “Devil’s Son” was the epitome of this demented phase:

I’m a stone villain known for killing and raping nuns
Hey yo I even kill handicapped and crippled bitches
Look at my scalp real close and you’ll see triple sixes

Of course, his streaks of downright evil were not limited to “Devil’s Son” – they permeated his whole debut album, including the track “Danger Zone”:

Im takin’ lives for a great price, I’m the type
To snap in heaven with a MAC-11 and rape Christ

Every minute, my style switches up, they said a real man
Won’t hit a girl, well I ain’t real cause I beat bitches up

Yet as early as 1995, when L was hardly 21 years old, he had told The Source magazine that he was already over the “horrorcore” stuff, which left L to join the ranks of countless East Coast rappers rapping about money, hos, and clothes. Although some rappers have used their memories of poverty and violence to forge revolutionary, political lyrics, L was part of the much larger class of rappers that tried to obliterate any remnants of their deprived, dangerous childhoods with the endless pursuit and boasting of wealth (“We don’t buy luggage, we go shoppin’ when the plane lands”). He was typical in many ways of a rapper coming up in the 90s: materialistic, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent. It was in this way that L was a product of his environment.

As many others had before him, L rose through the hip-hop ranks as a formidable freestyle battler. Thus, his recorded songs tended to follow the tried-and-true self-aggrandizing, chest-thumping rap formula: package all the rivals you’ve ever known or will know into a “you,” and then relentlessly attack this “you” until he is a pathetic, shriveled, humiliated husk quivering under your Nikes. And yet he rapped about all of this immature, closed-minded stuff in a manner so fresh and confident that you could find yourself actually singing along to the part where he states that he “beat[s] white cops ’till they life stops.”

Because Big L left a vast repertoire of Godless, gratuitously violent lyrics behind him, it leaves me in the awkward position of justifying my writing a memorial for him – and probably leaves you, the reader, scratching your head. After all, the man explicitly said he was going to hell numerous times — with plenty of good reasons (he’d need all the lyrical skill he could muster to coax the gates of heaven open after that Earthly performance.) And who better to write a memorial than a liberal white male who couldn’t hurt a fly!

Wait, why is that? Why am I compelled to devote so much time to make sure that this dead rapper, who bragged about doing so many fucked-up things and whose values ran contrary to my own, is remembered and even commemorated?

I won’t deflect the question by suggesting that Mr. Lamont Coleman was really a hella nice guy in real life, because I never met him or any of his acquaintances. So my only exposure to Lamont Coleman is through the records of Big L, and thus this memorial is for Big L, the artist, not Lamont Coleman, the man. Besides, I tend to take the existentialist view on legacies of artists. As Sartre said, “In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait,” and so for most of us what is left of Big L is the music he left behind, and only that.

So why have I been slobbering all over this morally deprived rap jock, this self-professed bad guy? Let me answer that question with another question: why do we sometimes root for the bad guy? Note the qualifying adverb: sometimes. For instance, I’m inclined to root for the Joker in the newest Batman flick, but I wouldn’t in a million years hope that the 312th Horde of Faceless Grey Men would actually be successful in defeating the Power Rangers.

Now you see where I’m going. The Joker has oodles of personality, a wicked sense of humor, a bag of tricks as diverse as the gadgets in Batman’s utility belt; The Power Rangers’ group of Colorless Cannon Fodder does not. The Joker has a past filled with struggles, an ego in pursuit of gratification, a psyche riddled with all the small contradictions of a real-life person – in short, he was an incredibly interesting character.

And so it was with Big L – funny and dark, playful and serious. He could tickle your funny bone and your “Oh, shit” bone at the same time. He was a man that bragged about committing crimes, but accurately described why a life of crime had a certain allure – because the alternative was worse:

My moms told me to get a job, fuck that
Aiyo, picture me getting a job
Taking orders from Bob,
Selling corn on the cob?
Yo, how the hell I’ma make ends meet
Making about 120 dollars a week?

With all that said, I’d like to add my own Rest in Peace to the pile for Big L, not because he was a great guy, but because he was a dynamic character forever etched in my memory, a colorful individual, a likable villain. He had personality, something so sorely lacking in the carefully constructed holograms of today’s musicians.
***

*For those of you who were wondering, Big L’s death had nothing to do with the famed East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry of the 90s. By 1999, Biggie and 2Pac were both cold in the ground and the battle was thankfully over. L was believed to have been killed by a childhood friend, Gerard Woodley, who was freed on insufficient evidence. Even the official Big L website confesses that the reasons for L’s death are unknown.

**Although Jay-Z had plenty of business savvy, his actual rhyming skills, in this writer’s opinion, paled in comparison to L’s. I point to the 7 Minute Freestyle as the irrefutable proof of my position.

Big L – Put it On

Big L – Devil’s Son

Big L — Ebonics

Big L – All Black

Big L and Jay-Z – 7-Minute Freestyle

Gang Starr – Full Clip