If you're serious about building a real familiarity with either American Literature or American Hip-Hop, the quickest way to piss off and alienate yourself from true fans of either world is to say, "Oh, no I still haven't checked out Hemingway (or Biggie)." Art-form-purists will wonder how you can even pretend to be a fan while claiming total ignorance of the big, angry granddaddy of the genre.
And they're right. Ernest Hemingway and Chris "Biggie Smalls" Wallace were really, really good at what they did.
The Pointless Biographical Similarities
For starters, both were incredibly influential in their respective fields (Plus? Fat!), but they also had a bunch of weirdly specific stuff in common. By his close friends, Hemingway was affectionately called "Papa," and according to several reliable sources, Biggie reportedly enjoyed being called "Big Poppa." Hemingway influenced entire generations of writers and Biggie had buttcheeks, wherein techniques reportedly dripped out, directly onto every rapper that came after him. And Hemingway received a Nobel Prize, which I think is the literary equivalent of a Source Award. In 1996, while working on his second album, Biggie was in a terrible car accident that shattered his left leg, and in 1954, Hemingway got into two plane accidents while traveling in Africa.
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