The Notorious B.I.G.
Also known as Biggie Smalls, Biggie, and Frank White, The Notorious B.I.G. is one of the most popular and influential rap artists of all time, selling a total of 17 million albums in the US alone. A contemporary and rival of Tupac Shakur, B.I.G.’s career was cut short in 1997, when he was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.
Born Christopher George Latore Wallace on 21st May 1972 in New York, B.I.G. grew up in the black neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Despite excelling at school, particularly in English, he turned to selling drugs at the age of twelve. B.I.G. continued on this destructive path as he grew older, eventually dropping out of high school at seventeen to pursue a life of crime. After serving five years’ probation on weapons charges, in 1991 he was arrested in North Carolina for selling crack cocaine, and as a consequence spent nine months in jail.
This term behind bars served to turn B.I.G.’s life around. On his release, he decided to follow up on his other teenage occupation, rapping. He recorded a demo tape which made its way to Source Magazine, who subsequently featured B.I.G. in the ‘Unsigned Hype’ column of their March 1992 issue. It was this that lead B.I.G. to Uptown Records producer Sean Combs, who would become a lifelong collaborator and close friend.
Although B.I.G. was signed to Uptown immediately, Combs was fired by the label shortly afterwards so B.I.G’s career with Uptown was short lived. Combs set up Bad Boy Records immediately after his departure from Uptown and B.I.G. duly followed in 1992, releasing his debut album, ‘Ready to Die’ two years later. At the time, most high profile rap music was coming from the West Coast, but B.I.G.’s hugely praised release served to switch attentions back East. This, along with the shooting of Tupac Shakur in which B.I.G. was implicated, marked the beginning of the notorious East and West Coast rap feud, which would culminate in the deaths of both Shakur and B.I.G.
Shakur was robbed and shot five times in the lobby of the Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan on 30th November 1994, where B.I.G., Combs and Uptown Records founder Andre Harrell were recording at the time. Suspicious, Shakur later claimed that the trio had advance knowledge of the robbery. B.I.G. denied this, saying, “It just happened to be a coincidence that he was in the studio. He just kinda' leaned the blame on me.”
Two years later, Shakur was shot and killed in a drive by shooting in Las Vegas. B.I.G. was immediately implicated, principally by the LA Times. The rapper denied the allegations, and the paper eventually printed a retraction. However, only six months later, two weeks before the release of his second album ‘Life After Death’, B.I.G. himself was killed in a drive by shooting in Los Angeles. His killers were never caught. However, the name of the record proved to be prophetic: it went straight to number one, and secured B.I.G.’s immortality as a true Godfather of hip hop.
