Off the record: Mum's the word, Biggie

Voletta Wallace, Biggie's mum, co-produced and helped to cast her son's biopic. She even appears in it, played by Angela Bassett, as the steadying presence who reminds our star what really matters in life. It is just a wonder she didn't call it "Chrissy-Poo".

Wallace, a New Yorker, was known for being 6 ft 3in and over 20 stone, but was most famous for being killed at the age of 24 in a drive-by shooting (his death prompting his friend Puff Daddy to release I'll Be Missing You, which topped the UK charts for three weeks in 1997).

Wallace's murder came six months after that of his West Coast rap rival Tupac Shakur, and while conspiracy theories raged, both men's mothers took charge of their sons' estates and released a slew of lucrative posthumous albums.

Tupac has been elevated almost to sainthood in the eyes of many rap fans thanks to the efforts of Mrs Afeni Shakur, but with Notorious, Voletta has managed to seize the moral high ground for her boy. Already a $35 million earner at the US box office, the movie is effectively the last word on a career riddled with guns, drugs and womanising. While Biggie doesn't come up smelling of roses, it's a more agreeable kind of manure.

Voletta certainly doesn't buy the mythology surrounding Tupac, whom Anthony Mackie plays as manic and paranoid, escalating the feud with his former friend following perceived slights for which he has no evidence. Biggie (played by uncanny doppelgänger Jamal Woolard) is innocently bewildered as the whole country starts to take sides in an East Coast/West Coast battle of the rappers.

But Biggie's dark side is impossible to ignore. He is seen womanising at every opportunity and stringing along three different ladies including fellow rapper Lil' Kim and his wife, singer Faith Evans. His early days as a school-age drug dealer are mostly portrayed without sentimentality. One truly vile moment is included, when he sells crack to a pregnant woman. "I ain't no social worker," he says.

Voletta is initially seen as naïve (she thinks the plate of drugs she finds under Biggie's bed is mashed potato), then as someone who loves her son despite everything. She concludes at his funeral that he was great because "people listened to him" regardless of what he said.

As a final gift, she gives him a happy ending. In the closing shots, he is seen gathering his family around him and getting back on good terms with his love interests. He also appears to be changing his attitudes, teaching his daughter to "never let a man call you a bitch" just moments after using the term to a girlfriend himself.

It's a stretch to imply that the man largely responsible for the gangsta rap template was on the verge of becoming a role model, but there it is on celluloid, more than likely to become unquestioned truth. If the Tupac-Biggie rivalry has continued through their mums, Voletta Wallace has done the best job of turning her son into the hero. What are mothers for?

NEW ON THE NET
*I've been obsessively playing with Spotify (www.spotify.com) for a while now and remain hugely impressed with the easy, legal availability of seemingly every song ever. It's been forced into retreat this week, though, announcing that some songs are to be either completely removed or made unplayable in certain countries. A shame, but as it had U2's new single even before the band's MySpace, it still looks like the future of online music to me.
 
*Napster (remember that?) is back in a new incarnation at www.napster.co.uk. It allows you to listen to your music collection online from any computer. Victory over iTunes is now surely impossible but this is a nice innovation.
 
*One of the greatest rap albums, Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys, is appearing in remastered digital form next week and can be pre-ordered at www.beastieboys.com. I'm particularly intrigued to find out what the "3D interactive digital album art" looks like.