Biggie was a storyteller

The argument

What distinguishes Biggie, on this argument, is not technical facility alone but what he used it for. His rap had substance: the songs were filled with material that was recognisable to young African Americans — circumstances, pressures and choices described as they actually presented themselves rather than as genre convention required them to look. That recognisability is what the word relatable is doing here, and it is a claim about honesty as much as about subject matter. The craft that carried it was narrative. Biggie pioneered the storytelling tools that Kendrick Lamar would later perfect, above all the use of multiple voices and characters within a single track. A verse that shifts between speakers can do what a first-person account cannot: it shows a situation from more than one side, lets a listener hear the reasoning of people whose choices are incompatible, and withholds the judgement a single narrator would impose. It turns a song into something closer to a scene than a statement. The third element is what those techniques conveyed. Biggie's lyrics were not chosen solely for political purposes, nor solely for entertainment, but as a complex combination of politics, art and culture — all of it in the name of storytelling. That combination is harder to sustain than either extreme. Work that is only political flattens into argument, and work that is only entertainment leaves nothing behind; holding both inside a narrative requires the political content to emerge from the characters rather than be announced over them. Because he built a method later rappers would refine, and used it to tell stories that were honest about the lives of the people listening, Notorious B.I.G. is the best rapper of all time.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While Biggie may have pioneered great storytelling in hip-hop, there are more versatile hip-hop artists as far as storytelling is concerned. Some tell incredible stories through both their lyrics and the music videos they create while others us their vocal and lyrical talents to tell stories to a larger audience than Biggie ever did. Rap has come a long way since Biggie's tragic death, and its development has led to even better hip-hop artists coming into the limelight.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Relatability is a claim about audience, and the premise makes it a criterion without defending it. Many rappers with strong claims to the title are relatable to their own audiences, so the property does not distinguish him — and the material is not principally political, being autobiographical narrative about crime, money and mortality, which the third premise then reclassifies. [Rejecting P2] "Pioneered" is too strong. Narrative rap with shifting perspectives and character voices was established before Ready to Die, in the work of Slick Rick, Kool G Rap and Rakim among others, and the distinction is the quality and detail of the execution rather than the invention of the device. Priority is also weak ground for a superlative, since the best practitioner of a technique need not be its originator. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion asks for the best rapper of all time and the premises establish excellence at one thing. Rapping is judged across several dimensions — flow, breath control, rhyme structure, voice, versatility, catalogue depth, longevity — and a career ended after two albums is short on the last two. Storytelling as a criterion also favours later artists on the argument's own reasoning, since it credits Kendrick Lamar with perfecting what it says Biggie began.