While we debate merits and sample size and Puff, and Faith and Pac, the question isn’t “IS Biggie Smalls the Greatest rapper who ever lived?”, but “CAN Biggie Smalls BE the greatest rapper who ever lived?” If your answer is no - that there just isn’t enough to qualify him among rappers who achieved generational longevity like LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, or Jay-Z - it’s a brief and simple conversation. When we discuss Christopher Wallace as the GOAT, we use all the wrong language and ask the wrong questions. But his monumental legacy doesn’t come from some godlike, alien greatness, but from his endlessly endearing humanity. He’s the closest thing hip hop has to a patron saint. A belt he wore and once happened to leave behind in an office at The Source took on talismanic properties, passed down from editor to editor through generations of staff at the iconic magazine. In New York, the places where he lived, where he walked, where he hung out, and where he recorded have become holy places, ordained sites. Because he died so young, and left such an impossible body of work, because of legends those who were around him in his brief lifetime continue to tell, his presence has become larger than life in our imaginations. It’s easy to lose Christopher Wallace in mythology.
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