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      ‘Last Man Standing’ Review: Revisiting a Murder (and a Murder Doc)

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      The British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries, again, to solve the killing of Biggie Smalls.In “Last Man Standing,” subtitled “Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac,” the British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries to tie up loose ends from his “Biggie and Tupac” (2002). That movie presented an unproven conspiracy theory that the rap mogul Marion Knight, widely known as Suge, was involved, along with corrupt police officers, in the 1997 shooting death of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, in Los Angeles, and the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. (Broomfield appears to tacitly roll back that claim in the new film, which gives a different emphasis to the events surrounding Shakur’s death.)The first doc’s dubious evidence was questioned, and Knight has long denied any involvement in the killings. But the idea behind “Last Man Standing,” Broomfield explains, is that with Knight now serving a 28-year prison sentence, people are more open to talking. Much of “Last Man Standing” plays like outtakes. There’s some kick in hearing that Knight apparently kept piranhas and fed them bloodworms, or in seeing footage of a pre-stardom, 17-year-old Shakur, the son of a Black Panther, discussing how the rich and the poor should change places every week.But the new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects. His trademark is appearing on camera and demanding answers with an obnoxious Fleet Street persistence. By contrast, the talking heads and blank backgrounds here are pretty dull, although it is amusing when Pam Brooks (returning from Broomfield’s “Tales of the Grim Sleeper”) insists to a wary party on the phone that the director can’t be an ex-cop because he’s English. “Last Man Standing” is backloaded; its efforts to counter an alternative theory of the case come mainly toward the end.Last Man StandingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Chi Modu, Photographer Who Defined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

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      His images of the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and many more helped shape rap music’s visual identity.The Notorious B.I.G., stoic and resplendent in front of the twin towers. Tupac Shakur, eyes closed and arms in the air, tendrils of smoke wafting up from his lips. Eazy-E, perched atop his lowrider, using it as a throne. Mobb Deep, huddled with friends on the rooftop of a Queensbridge housing project. Nas, reflective in his childhood bedroom. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, gathered in a circle and staring down at the camera, sharpness in their eyes.For the essential rap stars of the 1990s, odds are that their defining images — the ones imprinted for decades on the popular consciousness — were all taken by one person: Chi Modu.In the early and mid-1990s, working primarily for The Source magazine, at the time the definitive digest of hip-hop’s commercial and creative ascendance, Mr. Modu was the go-to photographer. An empathetic documentarian with a talent for capturing easeful moments in often extraordinary circumstances, he helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars. The Source was minting a new generation of superheroes, and Mr. Modu was capturing them as they took flight.Mr. Modu died on May 19 in Summit, N.J. He was 54. His wife, Sophia, said the cause was cancer.A portrait of Tupac Shakur taken by Mr. Modu in Atlanta in 1994. The two  had a special rapport, which spanned several years and photo shoots.Chi ModuWhen hip-hop was still gaining its footing in pop culture and the mainstream media hadn’t quite caught up, The Source stepped into that void. So did Mr. Modu, who was frequently the first professional photojournalist his subjects encountered.“My focus coming up,” Mr. Modu told BBC Africa in 2018, “was to make sure someone from the hip-hop community was the one responsible for documenting hip-hop artists.”His photos appeared on the cover of over 30 issues of the magazine. He also photographed the cover of Mobb Deep’s breakthrough 1995 album, “The Infamous…,” and “Doggystyle,” the 1993 debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg), as well as Bad Boy Records’ “B.I.G. Mack” promotional campaign, which introduced the rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack.“We were pretty primitive in our look at that time, and we needed someone like him,” Jonathan Shecter, one of the founders of The Source, said.Mr. Modu’s personality, he added, was “super cool, no stress, no pressure. He’d just be a cool dude hanging out with the crew. A lot of rappers felt he was someone they could hang around with.”Mr. Modu’s signature approach was crisp and intimate — he rendered his subjects as heroes, but with an up-close humility. As that generation of emerging stars was learning how to present themselves visually, he helped refine their images. (He had a special rapport with Tupac Shakur, which spanned several years and shoots.)“When you bring that high level of skill to an arena that didn’t have a high level of skill, you can actually create really important work,” he told Pulse, a Nigerian publication, in 2018.For Mobb Deep’s album cover, he scheduled time in a photo studio, which yielded the indelibly ice-cold cover portrait of the duo. “A huge part of our success was that cover — he captured a vibe that encapsulated the album,” Mobb Deep’s Havoc said. “To see a young Black brother taking photos of that nature was inspiring.”But Mr. Modu also spent a day with the duo in Queensbridge, the neighborhood they hailed from, taking photos of them on the subway, by the Queensboro Bridge, on the roof of the housing project building Havoc lived in. “Twenty-five years later they feel almost more important,” Havoc said. “They give you a window into that time.”Mr. Modu in 2011 with his fellow hip-hop photographer Ricky Powell, who also died this year.Brian Ach/Getty ImagesIn addition to being a nimble photographer — sometimes he shot his images on slide film, with its low margin for error — Mr. Modu was a deft amateur psychologist. “He could flow from New York to Los Angeles and go into every ’hood. There was never a problem, never an issue,” Mr. Shecter said. His wife remembered Mr. Modu leaving a Jamaican vacation to photograph Mike Tyson, only to arrive and learn Mr. Tyson didn’t want to shoot; by the end of the day, via charm and cajoling, Mr. Modu had his shots.Mr. Modu was also a careful student of the dynamic balance between photographer and subject — the celebrity was the raison d’être for the shoot, but the photographer was the shaper of the image. “The reason I am able to take control is that I am here trying to help you go where you are trying to go,” Mr. Modu told Pulse. “I’m on your team. I’m the one looking at you. You may think you are cool but I have to see you as cool to press my shutter.”Jonathan Mannion, a friend of Mr. Modu’s and a hip-hop portraitist of the following generation, said Mr. Modu played a crucial role in establishing the presence of sophisticated photography in hip-hop. “He kicked a lot of doors off their hinges for us to walk through,” Mr. Mannion said.Christopher Chijioke Modu was born on July 7, 1966, in Arondizuogu, Nigeria, to Christopher and Clarice Modu. His father was a measurement statistician, and his mother worked in accounting and computer systems processing. His family emigrated to the United States in 1969, during the Biafran war.His parents later returned to Nigeria, but Mr. Modu stayed behind and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness economics from Rutgers University’s Cook College in 1989. He began taking photographs in college — using a camera bought for him as a birthday gift by Sophia Smith, whom he began dating in 1986 and would marry in 2008 — and received a certificate in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center of Photography in 1992.Getty ImagesHe shot for The Amsterdam News, the Harlem-based newspaper, and became a staff photographer at The Source in 1992 and later the magazine’s director of photography.After leaving The Source, he consulted on diversity initiatives for advertising and marketing companies and was a founder of a photo sharing website. And he continued to take photos around the world, capturing life in Yemen, Morocco, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.Is addition to his wife, Mr. Modu, who lived in Jersey City, is survived by his mother; three sisters, Ijeoma, Anaezi and Enechi; a brother, Emmanuel; and a son and daughter. In the early 2010s, Mr. Modu began efforts to reignite interest in his 1990s hip-hop photography, initially by partnering with a New York billboard company to display his work.“He felt there were certain gatekeepers, especially in the art world,” Ms. Modu said. “He always said the people are the ones that appreciate the art and want the art that he had. And with the billboard thing, he was taking the art to the people.”The billboard project, called “Uncategorized,” led to exhibitions in several cities around the world. In 2014 he had a solo show at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. In 2016 he released “Tupac Shakur: Uncategorized,” a book compiling photographs from multiple shoots with the rapper.Working in an era when the conditions of celebrity photo shoots were far less constrained than they are now, he retained the rights to his photographs. He sold posters and prints of his work, and licensed his photos for collaborations with apparel and action-sports companies. Last year, some of his photos were included in Sotheby’s first hip-hop auction.Years after his hip-hop picture-taking heyday, Mr. Modu still left an impression on his subjects. DJ Premier of Gang Starr — a duo Mr. Modu photographed for the cover of The Source in 1994 — recalled taking part in a European tour of hip-hop veterans in 2019. During a stop in Berlin, he heard from Mr. Modu, who was in town, and arranged backstage passes for him.When Mr. Modu arrived, he approached a room where the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were all gathered. DJ Premier recalled the rapturous reception: “As soon as he walked it in, it was almost like a cheer — ‘Chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’” More

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      American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them

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      The band The Roots at the House of Blues in Chicago, Ill., October 24, 2000.Credit…Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesSkip to contentSkip to site indexAmerican Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire ThemRap and poetry have long been intertwined. Here, a handful of writers share some of the tracks that have helped them hone their own craft.The band The Roots at the House of Blues in Chicago, Ill., October 24, 2000.Credit…Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021, 8:00 a.m. ETTo complement T’s recent feature on how the barrier between rap and poetry is becoming increasingly porous thanks to a new generation of practitioners in both art forms, we asked a number of poets mentioned in the piece about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again.From Adrian MatejkaRun The Jewels, “JU$T (featuring Pharrell Williams & Zack de la Rocha)” (2020)[embedded content]Run the Jewels feel like the Black Arts Movement poets in their earned righteousness and seriousness about repetition, wordplay and political metaphor. Killer Mike and El-P also craft bars like poets craft verses, thinking willfully about sound device, allusion and metaphor.Young M.A, “PettyWap” (2019)Everything about this song inspires me sonically. I borrowed her habit of mosaic rhyme that’s really epistrophe (“stash in it, racks in it, / … ass in it”) and tried to figure out ways to use those repetitive octaves in the middle of lines instead of at the end.Rapsody, “Nina” (2019)She includes Reyna Biddy’s poetry at the end of the song — I love to see poetic bars and poetic verses in direct conversation.Gunna, “Wunna” (2020)Rhythm in poetry is dictated by all kinds of things — diction, syntax, meter, etc. But “Wunna” made me think about the ways sounds in words — alliteration, assonance and consonance — can make unexpected rhythms.From Kyle DarganPusha T featuring Kendrick Lamar, “Nosetalgia” (2013)Hip-hop, culturally, encourages a lot of allusion and broad sampling, but I think — and always impress upon my students — that there is something powerful about the ability to stay within and maximize one particular motif. And Push and Kendrick, in this song, really exhaust, creatively, their respective motifs of drug culture from their adolescence.The Roots featuring Bahamadia, “Push Up Ya Lighter” (1996)Listening to the Roots was formative for me, and one of the key features of a classic Roots track is the variance of lyrical flow. That’s also something to which I try to hold myself and my students: varying your rhythm and syntax. On this track, you hear a range, from Black Thought’s rapid and syllabically dense bars, to Malik B., with his stick-and-move lyrical phrasing, and then finally Bahamadia’s understated and wavy stressing and sound stitching.From Khadijah QueenMakaveli (2Pac), “Hail Mary” (2005)Tupac’s whole Makaveli album got me through a very difficult time when it was first released, because I could relate to feeling like I was up against impossible odds trying to survive as my whole true self in a sea of haters/naysayers/sexists/racists. But “Hail Mary” is the song I return to most often; it’s featured in my verse play “Non-Sequitur” (2015) as a musical interlude played on the cello. I just love the beat, that church bell, the high stakes and sense of vulnerability to fear and danger, a kind of dark faith and persistence alongside bravado and self-awareness.From Reginald Dwayne BettsMakaveli (2Pac), “White Man’z World” (2005)“Dear sister, got me twisted up in prison, I miss ya” — what else is there to say? And the ill thing about this joint is, when I think of my own craft, I recognize that Tupac Shakur is able to weave it all. There is the vulnerability here that Pac is known for. But, you know, I think about that other layer of social conscience, how we treat the people in our own community, how we treat Black women. That’s here, too.From Nate MarshallThe Roots, “Star/Pointro” (2004)Black Thought is a master of dense verse, and he has that one line in here that I think about all the time: “Ain’t it strange how the newspapers play with the language / I’m deprogrammin’ y’all with uncut slang.…” That’s basically the thesis of my last book.From Morgan ParkerA Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” (1990)My favorite conversation between sample and anthem. That lil’ moment where it’s still sort of just the Lou Reed song (“Walk on the Wild Side”) and the bass sneaks in, that’s where I live. I think there’s an entire generation of us who learned line breaks from Tribe.[embedded content]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biggie Smalls, the Human Behind the Legend

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBiggie Smalls, the Human Behind the LegendThe new Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” captures the rapper before fame, and history, got a hold of him.“Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” is mainly a prehistory of the Notorious B.I.G.Credit…NetflixMarch 1, 2021, 6:56 p.m. ETThere are only a few known photographs of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur standing side by side, but just one that’s truly canonical. It’s from 1993. Biggie is on the left in a checkered headband, posed tough, toothpick jutting out of his mouth. Pac is on the right, in a THUG LIFE beanie and a black leather vest over a skull-and-bones T-shirt, extending both middle fingers. They look a little standoffish to each other, two people taking a photo they’re not quite interested in sharing with the other.Photos are incomplete snapshots, of course. And Biggie and Tupac were friends before they became rivals. That’s clear from footage of that same day — from their friend era — which appears late in the new Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell.” They’re sitting at a table together, and Tupac is rapping for Biggie, an optimal audience. Both of them are lighthearted, two young rising stars finding a little respite with each other. As for the photo, a pose is just that.Memory — history — is what’s left standing when all the rough edges are sandpapered down. And in the case of the Notorious B.I.G. — who was one of the most commercially successful and creatively impactful rappers of the 1990s, and whose 1997 murder was a wound to the genre that remains unsolved — history has perhaps been unreasonably flattening. Almost two and a half decades later, the Biggie Smalls narrative (music aside) often feels reduced to a few image touchstones, or even just facial expressions, to say nothing of the generations-later conflation of the Biggie and Tupac story lines into one, especially given that their musical careers told very different tales about hip-hop at that time.The story that “Biggie” wants to tell is about how Christopher Wallace became Biggie Smalls, not how Biggie Smalls changed the world.Credit…NetflixThis fuzzying of the truth is a problem addressed head-on by “Biggie,” which is, in the main, a prehistory of the Notorious B.I.G. Maybe half of the film is about his music career, and of that, not much at all is devoted to his commercial prime. This makes the film anti-mythological, but also far more robust.The first footage you see in “Biggie” is of the rapper, then in his early 20s, shaving and joking about trying to hold tight to looking like his 18-year-old self. A little bit later, he’s goofily singing Jodeci’s “Freek’n You,” a slithery classic of ’90s R&B. For so long, Biggie has been enshrined as a legend, a deity — it unclenches your chest a bit to see him depicted as human.The story that “Biggie” — directed by Emmett Malloy, and reliant upon ample ’90s videotape shot by Biggie’s childhood friend Damion (D-Roc) Butler — wants to tell is about how Christopher Wallace became Biggie Smalls, not how Biggie Smalls changed the world. It delves into the relationship between his parents: Voletta Wallace, who has become a public face of mourning and grief, and the father he barely knew. It recounts childhood time spent in Jamaica, where his mother was born and where much of his family still resides, leaving largely unspoken the way that Jamaican toasting and melody slipped into his rapping.The film explores Biggie’s relationship with Donald Harrison, a saxophonist who lived on the rapper’s Brooklyn block and exposed him to art beyond the limits of their neighborhood.Credit…NetflixIt spends time with Donald Harrison, a saxophonist who played with Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner and Lena Horne, and lived on Biggie’s Brooklyn block, and who had a mentor relationship with a teenage Biggie — playing him jazz albums, taking him to the Museum of Modern Art, encouraging him to think beyond his neighborhood and to treat his rapping as an artistic practice.Harrison’s mentoring, though, is only one part of Biggie’s childhood education. The drug bazaar on Fulton Street, just around the corner from the stoop his mother rarely let him stray from, beckoned him and his friends. Eventually, he was selling crack, and the operation he and his crew ran took in a few thousand dollars a week, according to an old interview excerpted in the film. One time, he left crack out to dry in his bedroom, and his mother, thinking it was old mashed potatoes, threw it out.Before he was offered a pathway into the music business by Sean Combs, then Puff Daddy, selling drugs was Biggie’s most likely route. And for a while, the two careers commingled. Even Easy Mo Bee, who produced six songs on “Ready to Die,” describes driving onto Fulton to see if Biggie was on the block, offering to take him for rides as a strategy for disentangling him from his street business. But in 1992, Biggie’s childhood friend and running buddy Roland (Olie) Young was killed by his uncle, Carl (I-God) Bazemore, in a street dispute, and afterward, Biggie turned hard toward music.By that time, Biggie had already appeared in the Source magazine’s Unsigned Hype column. He’d also participated in a Brooklyn corner freestyle battle (that was fortuitously videotaped) that helped connect him with the D.J. 50 Grand, who he would record his demo with.Biggie with 50 Grand, the D.J. who worked with the rapper on his demo.Credit…NetflixBut even though his career was a spectacular comet ride, most of the parts of the film about that robust success focus more on how he treated his friends, and brought them along for the journey (under the Junior M.A.F.I.A. moniker). At one point, Biggie and a cameraman bust in on Lil’ Cease in a hotel room, undressed, and Biggie immediately turns into a big brother, turning to the camera lens and asking for privacy for his friend. Occasionally there is commentary from Combs, who is almost literally shining, a visual representation of the luxurious life that hip-hop would provide an entree to, which Biggie rapped about as fantasy but wouldn’t live to see.Most of the meaningful footage here is happenstance — a brutal trip on a tour bus without air conditioning or casual chatter in a room at Le Montrose, the Los Angeles hotel, during his final time in California. (The helicopter footage of Biggie’s funeral procession is also deeply moving, framing his death, and life, as a part of the city’s very architecture.)In the March 1997 San Francisco radio chat that’s presented as his final interview, Biggie is already sensing the way in which history will be selective in how it retells a deeply complicated narrative. Asked about his troubles with Tupac — who by then had died, but who had become a vicious antagonist before — Biggie doesn’t sound or look even slightly resentful. Instead, he’s measured, hoping to unravel a tricky knot before it becomes fixed. “Take a chance to know the person before you judge a person — that goes with anybody, not just me,” he tells the interviewer. “Try to get the facts first.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More