“I felt like I was already dead”, he explained to Rap City’s Joe Clair in his last ever interview. After being cajoled by his friends to pursue his artistry more seriously, he began working on what would eventually become Ready to Die, taking his conflicted feelings about his past decisions into the booth with him. He made his first demo tape, Microphone Murder after he got out. A drug bust in North Carolina for dealing crack cocaine put him in jail for nine months. Wallace made a few thousand dollars a week at his “peak”, but the ordeal weighed on his soul. He started selling drugs at the age of 12 and eventually dropped out of high school to live that lifestyle full-time.ĭespite the Notorious B.I.G.’s Murder Remaining Unsolved, His Mother Believes Justice Will Be Served He was a gifted student, especially in the arts, but the allure of the local drug trade and the money that came with it was too tempting to ignore.
Wallace grew up in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill area with his single mother, Voletta, who worked two jobs and did her best to keep her son on the right track. Why did Biggie feel like he was ‘already dead’ when Ready to Die came out? Biggie’s lyricism and storytelling choices were informed by a painful upbringing where money was scarce and desperation led to dangerous lines of work. The album was so popular and so much time has passed that two of the singles have become something akin to party records, but it was called Ready to Die for a reason.
His debut album Ready to Die instantly made Christopher Wallace a star and brought attention to the creative minds looking for a way out of New York City projects. Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, and Tupac’s 2Pacalypse Now.īut the East Coast had something to say, and no one said it with more wit, pathos, and style than The Notorious B.I.G. Rap music was a burgeoning new genre in the mid-’90s, but the biggest success stories tended to come out of the West Coast, like Dr. At random intervals, there comes a time when a piece of pop culture arrives and irrevocably changes the atmosphere.
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