When the future director Sacha Jenkins was growing up in Astoria, Queens, he was enthralled by a New York rapper who constituted a jolt to the musical system. “Biz Markie was so fresh and new,” Jenkins remembers of the early days of the late legend and hip-hop change-maker. “So compared to what hip-hop is today and what people are into now, his story is refreshing in a lot of ways.”
For the man born into a housing project before living in a tent under a Long Island bridge and then entering foster care, Markie funneled joyful art through his experiences, all the while keeping a childlike wonder about the world and influencing a genre in the midst of changing culture forever. It’s an improbable success story highlighted in Jenkins’s new documentary All Up in the Biz: The Life and Rhymes of Biz Markie.
