Biggie’s approach would prove to be wildly successful and hugely influential on how New York rappers would approach the mainstream in the post-Death Row Records landscape.īefore the success of Death Row, hip-hop’s most mainstream, crossover-friendly artists tended to be pop-rap superstars like Salt-N-Pepa and Heavy D. That development was significant, even as the East Coast’s latest wave of emcees were coming to the forefront. The first verse would become as ubiquitous as any in hip-hop, and it made The Notorious B.I.G. The classic breakthrough single was a fixture on MTV and BET in the late summer of 1994, with its Mtume sample (and uncredited production assist from superproducer Pete Rock) carrying Biggie’s semi-autobiographical rags-to-riches tale. “Juicy” would be a major success for Bad Boy and for Biggie. The MC would land some noteworthy early guest appearances on tracks by artists like Super Cat ( “Dolly My Baby”) and Heavy D ( “A Buncha N-as”), working closely with Combs at Uptown Records.īiggie would definitely blow up. From there, word got to upstart mogul-in-the-making Sean “Puffy” Combs about the gifted lyricist from Brooklyn. The story is well-known: Big Daddy Kane’s DJ Mister Cee heard Biggie on a tape and invited the burgeoning rapper to a showcase for The Source. And as he began to build a name torching would-be rhymers around Brooklyn and popping up on mixtapes with his DJ 50 Grand, when the right ears heard him, it was only a matter of time before a career was sparked. The way that it changed hip-hop has reverberated for 25 years.īiggie’s youth as a fledgling drug dealer in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn wasn’t all that different from most of his peers: single-parent households, poverty, and the crack epidemic were hallmarks of his generation. The man born Christopher Wallace was a peerless emcee, and his debut is one of the most fully-formed in music history. The rise of the Notorious B.I.G. brought a significant shift in hip-hop’s mid-'90s landscape, setting the stage for so much of how the world would see the genre going forward.

Ready to die notorious big