crossroads

Remember when Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads and returned with a whole new kind of blues? Last night, we watched “Notorious,” the Biggie Smalls biopic, and there’s a similar moment. The movie sort of glosses over where Biggie’s style came from, implying that it began on the street, but that Biggie really enhanced it during nine months in a North Carolina prison. It reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. Where did the Dylan sound come from? Scorsese diligently goes through all of the members of the 60’s Village scene, but then there’s a gap in which Dylan leaves the scene for a few months and then re-emerges with the style we all know. What is it about creating a new style that it has to happen in secret? “Notorious” is terrible, by the way. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to make a wooden, utterly uninteresting movie about Biggie, Brooklyn, the early 90’s, and East Coast v West Coast, but they found a way to do it.