The Man on High: Essays on Skateboarding, Hip-Hop, Poetry and the Notorious B.I.G. (PB) (2018)

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Film. Music. Twenty years after the murder of The Notorious B.I.G., THE MAN ON HIGH melds the creative and the critical, and questions what legacy means in the 21st century. Contemplating Biggie through the lens of both skateboarding and poetry, Jeff Alessandrelli's THE MAN ON HIGH illuminates how The Notorious B.I.G. will always be rapping in the present tense.

In an era where the imagination is bent on nostalgia, the '90s is the number one fetish object, and events like the OJ Simpson trial and the LA Riots are being rehashed in Adidas track suits and retro band merch (I'm writing this in a Sade t-shirt I bought in a suburb of St. Louis over the summer), to the extent that Kendall Jenner tried to sell t-shirts with photos of Biggie on them with no permission from his estate and played naive when she got shut down, we need the complex sincerity of THE MAN ON HIGH. This is a rare example of a black musician who helped set the tonal landscape for an entire subculture actually being given credit and proper attention and love. You'll come away craving a skateboard and some headphones, and feeling Notorious. --Harmony Holiday

A refreshingly heartfelt and multivalent treatise on influence, inspiration, and individuality, Alessandrelli's THE MAN ON HIGH waxes and melds in tribute to a true cultural icon and iconoclast, the B.I.G., along the way reconsidering the nature of the many frames that give us faith amid an era of 'mere numerical arbitrariness.'--Blake Butler