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4,201 words · no email, no account
No. 115 · Music · Hip-Hop
The Quad Studios Shooting
a biography of Christopher George Latore Wallace
What the book is
March 9, 1997. A green GMC Suburban idles at a red light on Wilshire Boulevard. A dark Chevy Impala pulls alongside. Four shots, and Christopher Wallace — twenty-four years old, three weeks from the release of the album he had titled Life After Death — is gone. The case is still open.
Jamal Whitestone's biography begins long before the intersection: in the Brevoort houses of Brooklyn, where a single mother raised a watchful, asthmatic boy with an ear for the cadences around him; on the Bedford-Stuyvesant corners where that boy learned to count money and weigh product before he learned to write a verse; in the basement studios where Sean Combs heard something nobody else had quite heard yet.
Whitestone follows the arc through Ready to Die, the ascent, the rivalry with Tupac Shakur that hardened from competition into something neither man could call back, the lobby of Quad Studios, the after-party at the Petersen. He draws on court filings from Voletta Wallace's civil suit, on LAPD case material accumulated across nearly three decades, and on the testimony of those who were in the rooms.
What emerges is a portrait of a young writer at the edge of his own myth, and of the city, the industry, and the institutions that have spent twenty-nine years declining to answer for him.
At a glance
- Subject
- Christopher George Latore Wallace
- Shelf
- Music · Hip-Hop
- Written by
- Jamal Whitestone
- Chapters
- 18 across 197 pages
- Narrated by
- Jamal Okafor
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- gun violence · homicide
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01Voletta WallaceRead free
- 02Brooklyn in the 1980s4,494 words
- 03The Young Christopher3,712 words
- 04The Voice Emerges3,658 words
- 05Unsigned Hype3,030 words
- 06Bad Boy Records3,149 words
- 07Ready to Die3,941 words
- 08"Juicy" and "Big Poppa"3,490 words
- 09Faith and Family3,639 words
- 10The Friendship with Tupac3,550 words
- 11Quad Studios2,725 words
- 12The East Coast-West Coast Conflict3,117 words
- 13Life After Death Sessions3,201 words
- 14Tupac's Death3,157 words
- 15Going to Los Angeles3,294 words
- 16March 9, 19972,956 words
- 17The Funeral3,174 words
- 18The Greatest Rapper3,304 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 197 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 197 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-049-2 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Jamal Okafor
ISBN 979-8-90623-030-0
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Quad Studios Shooting about?
Christopher George Latore Wallace. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Quad Studios Shooting — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,201 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 61,500 words, 18 chapters, 197 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: gun violence; homicide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- gun violence
- homicide
Listed before you buy, not after.
