Hubert says if Big had lived, the rap game would be very different today.
"The pain is deeper than just, than what you could imagine. "I can't wear a Biggie T-shirt, you know that, right?" Hubert says. After all, in a way, their friend lost his life because of rap. The two rappers had been friends, and there's a lot of speculation that their killings were connected.īig's friends still have a hard time talking about the music that he made. And he paid a price for looking for love."īiggie was shot to death March 9, 1997, only 6 months after Tupac Shakur was murdered. He was really looking for love and acceptance at the end of the day. "He wasn't the guy who did all these things. "The Chris I knew was a good guy," Harrison says. There's violence in them, and guns and drugs. But on some of them he spins the kind of Homeric tales of street lore that can be heard in a lot of rap. On some of his songs, Big tells true stories. Everybody."Īnd he only released two albums.
"Everybody took a piece out of Big that's on the charts right now. This whole generation took pieces and bits," AZ says. "When you actually tell a story and be descriptive, that takes talent."īiggie so impressed his peers in the mid-1990s that almost every New York rapper has recorded a song that includes a shout-out to him. "I don't care where, what part of the Earth you're from, when you listen to it, the dialogue is slow enough for you to digest it," he says. Flow is a beautiful thing."ĪZ says you can hear that on Biggie's song "Warning." Or you could take a fast beat and really screw it up and make it slow. You can take a slow beat and flow fast on it because it's the structure of the words. It's the fluidity of your words - and how you can slow it up, pick it up, chop it up. He describes flow this way: "Flow is like water. Rapper AZ met Biggie when Big was rapping on street corners. They choose a rhythmic pattern to match each beat. That's how rappers pace the voicing of their lyrics. But what he had more than anything else was flow. With the wit and presence evident on that song, Biggie put other rappers on notice.
By 1993, he had a song in the movie Who's The Man? called "Party and Bulls-t." Puff Daddy heard it and eventually signed Big to a deal. At least one person shot video of him free-styling on the street in Brooklyn when he was 17.Ī local DJ named 50 Grand made a mixtape for Big that ended up in the Source magazine's Unsigned Hype column. He reportedly began selling drugs, but he kept practicing. "What are you gonna do? Go out to the corner every day and bring him in the house by his ear? It's not gonna happen."īig dropped out of high school after his freshman year. So him and his mom had a big fallout because he basically stepped off the path." Hubert says there wasn't much Big's mom, a teacher, could do about his choice. "But the pull of the streets - it grabbed him, and he went that route. "He was on course to just be a brilliant student, college grad, possible doctor, lawyer," he says. Hubert says even after all that hard work and despite his obvious talent, Big lost focus for a while. So all of these things were part of Chris' early development, when he was MC CWest, and it was like he was on a quest to become the greatest of all time."
"Things kind of seemed to come easy to him, but that was from a lot of really being focused on getting as good as you could. People don't know that he really did take it serious at a young age," Hubert says. "We tried to go to the studio at the age, I believe, of 13. Hubert met Biggie in day care, and he became Big's DJ. Biggie started rapping with his friends Sam Hubert and Mike Bynum when they were 10 or 11 years old.