Biggie dedicates "Juicy" to three groups of people:
1. his teachers, who told him he would never amount to anything
2. his neighbors, who called the police on him when he was trying to make money to feed his baby
3. his peeps in the struggle
It's obvious that he intends the first two of these "dedications" to be ironic. But I never noticed before how he moves effortlessly from ironically "dedicating" it to them to non-ironically dedicating it to the third group. What's great is that he doesn't have to signal the switch, from irony to non-irony. It's just obvious.
2 comments:
Why do the first two dedications have to be ironic? Why not read them straight, as offering a kind of forgiveness? At the end of the dedications Biggie does say, "it's all good".
I hear the "it's all good" comment at the end as a kind of "fuck you" to the haters (which is foreshaded by the "fuck all y'all" that starts the song), but I'm intrigued by your reading. One of the themes of the song is "stereotypes of a black male misunderstood" which, I think, supports my reading. But he also says "we went from negative to positive", which supports your reading.
I'm trying to listen to the intro in the spirit of your reading now. It's not as hard as I thought it would be when I first imagined what it would be like.
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