DISGRACELAND - The Notorious B.I.G. Pt. 1: Dealing Crack on the Corner, Spitting Beef and Creating One of the Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

The Notorious B.I.G. entered adulthood as a crack dealer and left this world as one of the most famous hip-hop stars of all time. He was murdered mysteriously and before that was arrested almost too many times to count. He eventually altered the course of hip-hop with the release of his debut album, Ready To Die, an album that served as a soundtrack of sorts for the highly publicized, dangerous, violent beef between himself and his one-time friend, fellow rapper, Tupac Shakur. But that whole saga almost never happened. Find out what changed the course of Biggie Smalls’ life and ultimately led to his untimely demise in part one of The Notorious B.I.G. story. This episode was originally published on May 11, 2021. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monjou, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court.

On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about the notorious BIG are insane. He was arrested almost too many times. times to count. He entered adulthood as a crack dealer, and he left this world as one of its most famous hip-hop stars, murdered mysteriously. The Notorious B.I.G. altered the course of hip-hop, but the release of his debut album ready to die, an album that served as a soundtrack of sorts for the highly publicized violent beef between himself and his one-time friend, fellow rapper Tupac Shakur. But the Notorious BIG's career wasn't all about the beach.

beef. It was also obviously about the music he made, great music. That music you heard at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Cola Party Hop, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to I'll make love to you by boys to men. And why would I play you that specific slice of baby face-panned cheese could I afford it? Because that, was the number one song in America on September 13, 1994. And that was the day the notorious B.I.G released his debut album, Ready to Die, marking the beginning of his very short, impactful, and notorious career. On this, part one of a special two-part episode, dealing crack, spitting beef, easy flow,

hard beats in the notorious BIG. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is The Scraiceland. America was, is, and always will be about opportunity. The rub is that depending on one station in life, opportunity comes in different forms. For Freeway Rick Ross, an illiterate high school dropout living in South Central Los Angeles in the late 1970s, opportunity came in the form of rock cocaine. A born hustler, he couldn't believe the profit potential of this familiar drug went cut into a new form. Cocaine users couldn't believe.

how cheap it was, and Colombian wholesale distributors couldn't believe the ingenuity and ambition of their American street supplying partners. America. Opportunity for all. For freeway Rick Ross, the cash gushed in. A Nicaraguan connection supplied Freeway Rick in bulk direct from the Median cartel in Colombia. Rick took as much weight as they could provide, which in the 80s was a lot. He was buying upwards of 400 million kilos a week, turning a profit of $3 million a week. Serious weight turned into serious cash through an ambitious national distribution network that Freeway Rick set up. It took advantage of this country's vast interconnectivity via Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway system.

Once procured in Los Angeles by way of Mexican drug smugglers from its Colombian origin, Freeway Rick Ross took his cocaine and modified it into its highly addictive smokeable rock form, also known as crack cocaine. Packaged it and shipped it out en masse to streetside hustlers on corners all over urban American neighborhoods who chopped it up, repackaged it, and peddled it to mostly vulnerable, addicted members of their own communities. The crack shipped out of L.A. south on the 10 East to Arizona, then north on 17 to Interstate 40. From there, the illicit drug rode Highway 40 all the way east to Oklahoma City,

and from O.K. City, the crack cut northwest on Interstate 44 to Jefferson City. And from the Jeff, it shot due north on 55, and then east on Interstate 90, straight toward North Central America's unconquered cocaine market there for the taking, Ohio. So hungry was Ohio for Freeway Rick's crack that the return for him was like tapping into a well-stock bankfall. And Ohio was nothing compared to what lay two states away in New York with its city's five hungry boroughs. If Ohio was like a bank vault for a drug dealer like Freeway Rick, then New York was like the Federal Reserve. The cash flew back west and the crack poured into Manhattan. From interstate 80 to 280 east to the Holland Tunnel through lower Manhattan via Canal Street,

over the Manhattan Bridge onto Concord Street to the BQE East, off the expressway onto Washington Street, through Clinton Hill, left on gates, right on St. James, dead ahead to Fulton Street, and straight into the pocket of a young hustler on the corner, with an imposing build, a lazy eye, and an unmistakable flow. Spitting rhymes on the corner with his boys between games of sidewalks, clocking every driver of every car rolling by with that lazy eye, scoping for two things, customers for the rock and his sock tucked in under his timbrelands, always untied, always brand new, fresh, like everything else about his appearance,

and cops looking to bust him in the grill with the butt of their 9mm glocks, brace his wrists and haul him in and off to Rikers Island for seizing what he believed to be the only opportunity available to him, capitalizing on Freeway Rick Ross's own opportunity by dealing his crack cocaine. Boy was Biggie Smalls wrong. The corner game was a lazy means to a corrupt end. Cash he brought in, brought him the Tims and the leather duster, the polo, and the other swag he needed to stay quote-unquote fresh.

A requirement for all Bedford-Stuyvesant teens of the era, the late 1980s, one necessary to keep relevant with the ladies and on point with the fellas. Status, sure, but also, for a young man of modest upbringing, self-respect as well. Biggie Smalls had nicked his name from the movie Let's Do It Again, after the film's gang leader character. His mother Violetta had named him Christopher Wallace. She was a hard-working Jamaican immigrant who'd earned her way from nothing to the cusp of the middle class. And despite however he rationalized his drug dealing, he did have options. And despite being a smart student, he dropped out of Brooklyn's Westinghouse High, where fellow rappers DMX and JZ also attended, and hit the corner, where, just as he had in school, he excelled.

He took the game seriously. He wasn't going to end up in jail. And he sure his shit wasn't going into the straight world with the dead-eyed bums he watched entering and exiting the subways every day. He'd bounce out of bed early for him at 9 a.m. and hit the check-cashing spot by 9.15, just in time for the crack fiends to get their hands around their cashed social security checks and eager to exchange it for Biggs product. Late mornings and early afternoons were slow, but by 4.30, the hustle would hit home hard with the exiting subway commuters. Most moving down Fulton and their zombie norm trances back to their bratty kids and annoying wives, but some stills. stopping, you'd buy a jack or two, and obliterate any and all real-world obligations. The suburban kids would come out at night too, in from Jersey or upstate, looking for their

dirty city fixes, and Biggie would happily oblige. He didn't discriminate. It was all business. Locals, bridge and tunnel, men, women, kids. He even had a pregnant customer he kept supplied with crack on the regular. Other dealers drew the line with selling to pregnant women. was well known that the heavily addictive qualities of crack transmitted to the unborn, giving rise to the well-publicized crack babies of the 80s and 90s, innocent friendly fire casualties of Ronald Reagan's drug war and freeway Rick Ross's trade.

But Big didn't care. He later told a journalist, I didn't get in this game to feel sympathy for nobody. I got in this game to eat because I can't do nothing else. But of course, the world would soon learn that Christopher Wallace could do something. something else. In fact, for Biggie Smalls, aka B.I.G. A.K.A. The notorious B.I.G. When it came to doing the job of making and recording rhymes, he could do it better than most. There's two golden rules that

any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your Girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the eye.

Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.

And he went out the front door, and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, and my first thing

is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head. with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like,

making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction

or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things.

Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver. And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1989, another summer, sound of the funky drummer. Chuck D. wasn't fucking around. And by the time he and his group, Public Enemy released, fight the power, their devastating indictment of what they saw

as an American capitalist system of white oppression, the track that screamed off the screen of Spike Lee's 1989 masterpiece do the right thing. Hip-hop had fully transitioned from a once-dismiss novelty to full-on cultural force, and the proof was all over Biggie Smalls' teenage bedroom walls. And it wasn't just public enemy posters. Slick Rick, KRS-Wan, the Jungle Brothers, L.L. Cool J, Eric B. and Rakim,

and of course, Brooklyn's finest Big Daddy Kane all enshrined Biggie's room. He was growing up amidst the masters of the Golden Age of Hip Hop, and none were more influential in those early days to him than Kane. Big Daddy Kane came up in Flatbush, studied at the nearer. of Marley Marl's juice crew from Queens and put pen to paper for Biz Marquis. Big Daddy Kane grew into a fierce neighborhood battle rapper, one of the deadliest to ever grab the mic. His success was inevitable. With East Coast tours, videos on Yo MTV Raps and singles blasting from neighborhood boom boxes, at Brooklyn at least, his legend was large, his shadow

long. And Biggie loved the music, sure, but the possibility of making something for nothing through music as Kane was doing, stuck to him. He would spit rhymes on the corner with his boys while hustling. He was better than they were, and that was obvious, but there was no time for real rap. Dealing crack was a full-time job. Sometimes sleep was impossible. Biggie woke up on his mother's sofa and headed into his bedroom to get back to work,

to finish cutting and bagging his crack stash to take to the streets, but it was a problem. His stash was gone. The dinner plate he used to cut and sort his dress. drugs on was where he left it on his bed, but the pile of crack he left on top of it had disappeared. He looked everywhere, tore his room apart, and when he came up empty, he looked to the eyes on his wall for answers. Chuck D. said nothing, just stared down in silent judgment. The Jungle Brothers looked typically aloof. Eric B. and Rakim nonplussed and Kane satisfied that his one-day

competition was distracted and thus unable to come for his crown. Then Biggie's heart sank, realizing what must have happened, his moms. He dragged himself shamefully into the kitchen and asked his mother if she'd been in his room, only to clean up a bit, she replied. She then told him that he shouldn't leave half-eaten plates of food lying around as they attract cockroaches and asked him to grab the plate in his room, the one with the old, hardened, quote, mashed potato she'd emptied into the trash. Biggie's boys on the corner laughed when we told them the story.

The image of him on all four was. combing through his trash barrel, picking crack out of it, was hysterical to them. But the last wouldn't last. In 1990, at the age of 17, shortly after the Crack Potatoes incident, Biggie Smalls was arrested for possession of an unregistered loaded firearm. The judge went easy on him and gave him only five years probation, but local cops were on to him from that point on, constantly clocking him, searching him, coming by his mom's house to warn her about what her son was up to,

dealing crack. She didn't believe them, and she couldn't barely believe her son at all when he came home shortly after his arrest and told her he was going to be a father. His girlfriend was pregnant. It was his. He was going to do what his dad hadn't done and raise up his child, but was zero job prospects for a 17-year-old high school dropout and too much pride to beg or borrow. Husseling crack looked to be the only answer until a DJ named 50 grand entered his world. Fifty heard Biggie rhyming on corners and at house parties and recognized his talent immediately. He told Biggie he had the gear to make a tape, so they did. His confidence, his command, his rhymes when the tape rolled were all way beyond what

anyone expected for a first time to be laying down in a makeshift neighborhood studio. When Biggie heard himself coming out of the speakers, flowing over the breakbeat from the emotion's blind alley, a well-known run of tape that Big Daddy Kane had repurposed for his ain't no half-stepping. He was even surprised. He knew he had the skills, but to that point it was all a dream. Hearing himself in real life on tape, it was nothing short of compelling. 50 grand was blown away. His boys were blown away.

And more importantly, 50 grand's neighbor, the well-connected DJ Mr. C, was also blown away. C, fresh off tour with Big Daddy Cain, upon hearing Biggie's tape, was said to say that he was so impressed that he couldn't breathe. C agreed that he would try to get Biggie a record deal. Biggie warned him not to fuck it up. Cee he did the big man's advice and got down the business. First, they recorded a proper demo. Second, C sent the demo off straight away to an influential editor of The Source magazine.

The writer punched up a piece for his unsigned hype column, a column so impactful that it was known to literally make careers. Rappers, Mobbed Deep, and DMX get signed off of write-ups and unsigned hype. And so too would Biggie Smalls. But the writer did Biggie one better and tipped off a young, scrappy A&R kid from Harlem by the name of Sean Puffy Combs. Sean Puffy Combs was ambitious and wise beyond his ears.

His ear for talent was as keen as his eye for identifying marketable qualities and artists. When Puffy heard Biggie Smalls, it was clear the kid had skills, but what he saw Biggie Smalls, Puffy knew he had something truly special. Biggie's look would have turned off most A&R men at the time. He was big, 375 pounds at his heaviest.

But unlike the fat boys, Biggie Smalls wasn't comical, and unlike heavy D, Biggie Smalls didn't have his edges softened by R&B. Biggie Smalls was 6'2 and intimidating to look at. He looked exactly like what he was. A street corner, drug-dealing thug, slinging crack rock as a means to survive, even if it cost someone else's life. His image was menacing. Sean Combs sniffed out the potential.

immediately, Biggie Smalls could have a unique kind of appeal. Biggie Smalls could be notorious. But even with Sean Combs' interest, a deal was hired to paper. Puffy was working on his own future, Machiavelliing his way out from under his mentor, Andre Harrell, at Uptown Records, and into his own joint venture label with Arista Records. He had the perfect name for, Bad Boy Entertainment, and the perfect artist lead the way. Biggie Smalls, newly christened, the notorious B.I.G. Still, despite Combs' earnest interest in launching his career, Biggie Smalls waited for his record deal,

and with a new baby on the way, he waited impatiently for the much-needed money his deal would come with. Money needed to take some of the pressure off. He waited, waited some more and then some more, until finally deciding that the deal was a bust, and in the absence of a music career, he'd need to go back to the only other thing he was good at, dealing crack.

So that's what he did. When it came to crack for Biggie Smalls, the weight was in New York City, but the cash was now in North Carolina. In Brooklyn, crack was everywhere. Buyers could afford to shop around. If they didn't like what Biggie was peddling, they could move on down the block to the next dealer for a better price. Making money, real money, money that could feed a family, was becoming harder for Biggie in New York. But in North Carolina, he had a connect, a connect to a seller's market. There was less crack down south, but there was hardly any less demand.

In fact, Biggie could post up in Raleigh, and buyers would drive into town en masse looking to purchase in bulk to take care of their street-corner dealers who in turn took care of their local feeds. The money poured in. Biggie and his connect were pocketing about $30,000 every two weeks. Not bad for a high school dropout. North Carolina was anything but a lonely existence. Around town as a hustling export, he was a bit of a local celebrity in the clubs.

He was enjoying himself, having fun, stacking. cash and had no intention of rushing back to New York anytime soon. But his phone wouldn't stop ringing and his pager wouldn't stop buzzing. His mom, his girl, Puffy, no doubt with more bullshit about an impending deal that never seemed to come. And Biggie tried ignoring the distractions of home and to instead focus on the hustle, focus on the fun, but sooner or later the messages got through and they're all the same. Christopher, where the fuck are you? Puffy won't stop calling looking for you. Hit him back and call me back, motherfucker. I'm about to have your goddamn baby and I needs money and and and eventually biggie smalls did indeed call sean puffy combs back from his

and his drug dealing partners rented apartment house in raleigh north carolina puff knew what biggie was doing down there and told him he was a damn fool and he had a contract and a check waiting for him on his desk and that if he went and got himself busted for dealing weight which was every day he pressed his luck became more and more of a likelihood then there would be no rap career from behind bars Biggie protested. He was making good money. What did he need to fuck with the music industry for? Puffy assured him this wouldn't be no one-and-done flash-in-the-pan nonsense.

He had a plan, a plan to make him a star. That this wasn't just about Biggie Smalls. It was about the launch of Bad Boy Entertainment as well. It was about Sean Puffy Combs climbing out from the shadow of his mentor and making it on his own. So he best get the fuck out of Dodge with the quickness and get himself back to Manhattan to sign his deal and cash his check. So that's what Biggie Smalls did. He split North Carolina for New York City that very same morning after getting off the phone with Puffy and headed north to try and make his way as a rapper, just like Kane, a life in hip-hop,

without the cocaine, a different kind of hustle. That afternoon, after he left the house he rented in Raleigh with his North Carolina Connect, the house was raided by the cops. Everyone in it was promptly arrested on stiff drug distribution charges and eventually sentenced to long prison terms. But not Biggie Smalls. He was off, out, about to be on some other trip entirely. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air. So much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.

Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.

And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do?

Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head. with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like, making karate noises.

And the entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu.

Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver. And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. How about dope? Grass, hash, coke, mescaline, downers, nevino, two and all, chlorohydrates? How about uppers, xenphetamines? Biggie shook his head. He wasn't interested.

Crystal meth, I can get you crystal meth, nitrous oxide. How about that? How about a Cadillac? I get to a brand-new Cadillac with a pink slip for 20 grand. Biggie just stared at the bed in the cheap motel where they were haggling. Easy Andy wouldn't shut up. The easy part of his name must have been a joke because he was anything but easy to deal with. Maybe he got the name because he could get you whatever you wanted easily.

Biggie didn't know. All he knew was that he wanted to talk about the guns, laid out neatly in the suitcase on top of the bed. The 44 Magnum in particular. Andy called it a real monster, and it was. It could stop a car at 100 yards, put around right through the engine block. It was beautiful, too, but it wasn't practical. Unlike the 38 snub nose, another beauty, nickel-plated, compact, but powerful

and reliable, nice action, heck of a wallop. Cops carried them for a reason, and Biggie wanted them both, as well as the Colt 25 automatic, a real honey, a nice little gun in the 380, eight shots in the clip, sophisticated by comparison to the rest. He's Andy told him that in World War II was only issued to officers. Classy. Biggie liked that. He knew Tupac Shakur would too. After all, the guns were four, Tupac. Biggs knew brother from a wildly different mother. For an extra five large, Easy Andy would see to it that the guns made it safely to Tupac out on the West Coast. A heavy freight charge, but for Big, it was worth it. After securing the deal for the guns, Big hopped in the back of his chauffeur at SUV.

Dr. Dre's let me ride blasted through the speakers. Man, this shit never got old, Biggie thought. The album was a big influence for the notorious BIG's first album, Ready to Die. Released as promised on Sean Puffy Combs' as Bad Boy Entertainment on support. September 13, 1994, the album was a hit out of the gate, selling half a million copies in its first week, and though Dray didn't produce the album, his chronic had a lot to do with its success. Big Hurd in the chronic, a kindred style, a laid-back sensibility that he could relate to. Because it wasn't just laid back, it was real.

The hardcore realism of West Coast rap was something that had recently fallen out of fashion on the East Coast, where conscious rap, with its positive messages and Beto Boy academic vibes reigned supreme. East Coast hip-hop in the early 90s was more huxtable than hardcore, and that didn't speak to Bigg. Sure, Tribe Call Quest and De La Sol were on to something, but it didn't do for Biggie what The Chronic did.

So when it came time to write and record his debut, Big enlisted some of the East Coast deadliest production weapons. Easy MoBee and DJ premiere to craft beats into a unique style befitting the big man. Like Dre, Big would mix the hard with the smooth. Hard, as in the hardcore New York City street reality where Big made his living dealing drugs. Smooth, as in the easy R&B sensibilities

that sophisticated East Coast listeners caught into. Whereas Dre turned to George Clinton and Zap, Big turned to Isaac Hayes and Teddy Pendergrass. And just as Snoop went laid back with that unique flow of his, Big was able to do the same with his flow. But like Snoop, Big's voice and Big's flow were entirely his own. And when it all came out, filtered through his authentic street point of view and personality, it was very clear that the notorious BIG was on to something entirely unique for the time.

And just as Dre had done with The Chronic, Big had now done with Ready to Die, created another inflection point for the artist's relatively young musical genre. With one fully realized artistic statement, with one album, his debut album, The Notorious B.I.G. ushered in a new phase of hip-hop. When The Notorious B.I.G released his debut album, Ready to Die, on Sean Puffy Combs as Bad Boy Entertainment, the results of Biggie's creative vision, a melding of sorts between East and West Coast sensibilities are undeniable. Kids loved it, critics loved it, fellow rappers loved it. Tupac Shakur included, ever since first hearing the notorious B.I.G. in 1993, Tupac was enamored of him.

both as a person and as a fellow rapper. And of course, Big was in a kind of awe of Tupac, who at the time was a little further along in the rap game. The two men, despite their many obvious differences, became fast friends both fulfilling something different in the other. Tupac grew up poor, the son of a Black Panther, a radical activist, an addict. He'd learned his trade from real-life revolutionaries.

It was as hardcore and real a background as a rapper could have, and Christopher Biggie Smalls Wallace envied Tupacomaru Shakur for it. Biggie grew up with a single mom, sure, in the middle of a dangerous city. But in comparison to the way Tupac grew up, B.I.G. was bourgeois, practically middle class. And that said, Tupac, as a child growing up, was bookish and a serious student of the arts. He attended the prestigious Baltimore School for Performing Arts. And though his neighbors on the hard streets of Baltimore, no doubt lived lives of violence and crime, and though his mother's friends were some of the country's most revolutionary activists,

Tupac was relatively soft by comparison. And in Biggie, he saw a real street thug, someone who had the balls to take what was his by any means necessary through his chosen trade of drug dealing. They loved hanging out with each other. When one was on the other's coast, they took care of each other. Big hosted Pock, Pock did the same for big, and when Tupac's big mouth started getting him in trouble,

and his fame started to freak him out, and he began complaining about having to look around too many corners for fear of getting jacked. Big did what friends do and looked out for his boy. He shipped him the fresh arsenal he procured in a dingy East Coast motel, handpicked just for his paranoid friend out west. But either the guns came to later, Tupac forgot, or didn't bother to make sure they made their way back with him east

for his next trip to New York. Or perhaps he just didn't bother to carry one with him that night to call. Quad Studios to feature on the Bad Boy Records artist Little Sean's session that was going on a floor below where Bigg and Puffy were also recording, working on Biggie's warning video. Tupac had a lot on his mind. The trial for sexual assault that he was up against was wearing on him and draining his bank account, which is the real reason he was doing the session that evening. He needed the cash, but the session would never happen. Potts came as soon as he entered the hallway at Quad Studios, five of them, from the pair of nine millimeters carried by the roughnecks shaking him down. They wanted his money and his jewels.

One in the hand, two in the head, one in the thigh, exit through the skirt. The shooter split after running Tupac's jewels and his cash. He crawled into the hallway elevator, got a bloody finger on the button, and was lifted to the second floor studio. When all was said and done, Tupac came out of the melee, having survived with five gunshot wounds. With Tupac in the hospital nursing his wounds and then in and out of court in extreme pain, Big ran all over town trying to buy as much weed as he could for his friend to help him recuperate. He had Pock's best interests and well-being front of mind after the shooting. But Tupac had a different point of view.

From where he sat, after the trial, in prison, sentenced to the same. to one and a half to four years for first-degree sexual abuse, he started to see his friend in a much different light than his friend saw him. To Tupac, Biggie and Puff's reaction in the immediate aftermath of the quad shooting was highly suspicious. Pock recounted to a journalist in a jailhouse interview that when Biggie and Puff saw Tupac bleeding out on the floor with fresh gunshot wounds, they didn't move to help him. In fact, they looked surprised to see him. Tupac was insinuating that Big and Puff, his friends were surprised because they knew he was going to be shot, so they were thus surprised to see him alive.

Nine months into his sentence, Tupac was sprung from prison by Dr. Drey's notorious Blood Street Gang-affiliated Death Row Records label boss Shug Knight, and thus now firmly under the wing, protection, and career in financial control of Shug. With that muscle at his back, Tupac became more outspoken than ever, except now, Instead of preaching the raw truth of life in the ghetto for young black men, Tupac was spreading his gospel of the quad studio shooting, specifically his belief that Big and Puff had set him up. When this happened, the media smelled blood.

With the newfound rivalry between Tupac Shakur and his former friend, The Notorious B.I.G, between Shug's new record label Death Row Records and label Bosch Shug Knight and Biggie's label Bad Boy Entertainment and its boss Sean Puffy Combs, And between the coast, West versus East, the beef was undeniably compelling. It sold newspapers, it sold magazines, and most important, it sold records. The music press often chronicle the rivalry between Chakur's West Coast Death Row Records. It is like a good night. And Biggie Small to Bad Boy Entertainment was Sean Puppie Holmes.

Shakur has been at the center of a battle between East and West Coast rappers. It has been a battle mostly of words. and users. But as recently as Wednesday night, Shakur was in Newport at the MTV Music Awards. He and his friends got into a confrontation at Radio City Music Hall, which the police had to break up. And talk

again tonight about reports that Chakour's death is a result of an ongoing East versus West rap dispute. Tubac Chouac Chouar was writing in this black BMW. Tobok Chouacour was writing in this black BMW when the gunfire erupted.

After Mike Tyson, knocked out Bruce Seldon in under a minute 20, Tupac sat in the passenger seat of Shug's BMW at the corner of East Flamingo Road in Kova Lane, and Shug was at the wheel. From out of nowhere, a late model Cadillac rolled up along the passenger side of the BMW. Then, countless bullets fired.

One in Tupac's arm. One in Tupac's thigh. Two in his chest. The one in his right lung, the kill shot. The notorious BIG cried when he heard the news that his friend Tupac Shakur had been shot and killed. First, he couldn't believe the way Tupac was behaving toward him. Now he couldn't believe that Tupac was gone, murdered,

with the killer still on the loose, and with a new record to finish writing and recording, a follow-up to ready to die, there was no time for tears, never mind actually processing his grief in any real way. Tupac's death had Christopher Wallace in shock. It was never supposed to come to this. How did everything, it seemed, become so complicated?

Hip-hop stardom was supposed to alleviate the pressures of life, not add to them. But that was exactly what had happened. Biggie no longer knew what his purpose was. To be famous? For what? And how? On some beef that kills your friendship and gets someone you admire killed? To be a father, a husband?

He and his baby mama had split before his child was even born, but he still wanted to provide his baby with everything. Except he had other commitments now. To his wife, Faith Evans, to his fans, he was pulled in so many directions at once and committing himself in earnest to family life at the rambunctious age of 24 just wasn't happening. He was too young to fully commit or to settle down in any real way. Hit to be an artist? Maybe.

But life was so complicated that it was near impossible to find the brain space to fully invest in the new album he was making. Biggie's complications didn't all of a sudden die with Tupac. Big had recently been arrested, again, this time, for marijuana possession. His car was impounded, and at the moment he was desperately needed at the studio. He and his boy, Lil Cs, rented a shipbox Chevy Lumina to get them to where they needed to be in time for the session. The car rental place was dubious, and the Lumina was a legit honk, but it was all that was available to rent, and Big was determined to get to the studio, get into the work, get his mind off of things. They drove through the rain on high.

highway in silence despite his recent arrest and the complicated mess his life had become with fame despite the beef that still raged between the coast despite teupac's passing in this moment at least with the sound of the wet highway passing them by the silence in the car the radio off no yamoring from cease rain pelting the car to save 55 miles per hour the hypnotic swipes of the windshield wipers It all added up to a kind of momentary piece for Biggie Smalls. And then Cise went to make his exit off the highway. He put his foot to the brake pedal, only to realize that there were no brakes in this piece of shit Chevy.

They'd completely gone useless. The car refused to slow on the off ramp, and they glided over the wet road at a furious cliff. Sees turned to Big for an answer, and then... I'm Jake Brennan, and this episode of Disgraceland is to be continued. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show.

We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly, unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at Disgraceland Pod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at DisgracelandPod.

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On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in.

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