Biggie Smalls Biography

Christopher Wallace - also called Notorious B.I.G. and aka Biggie Smalls, lived a short life. When he was gunned down in Los Angeles, he was 24 years old in 1997, a murder that has never been solved. Smalls was from New York, and he virtually single-handedly revolutionised East Coast hip hop, which was eclipsed in the early 1990s by Dr. Dre and Death Row Records' West Coast "g-funk" style.

With his loud and clear baritone, easy flow on the mic, and willingness to face the harshness and fragility of the hustler lifestyle, he is a force to be reckoned with. Smalls shifted the spotlight back to New York and his Bad Boy Records label. He pretended to be a mobster, but in truth, although not being an angel, he was more of a showman than a hardcore criminal. He was similar to Tupac Shakur, his one-time buddy turned bitter foe, in this aspect -  a competition - went horribly out of hand, leaving neither guy living to tell the tale

Biggie Smalls Biography

Let us look at the Biggie Smalls biography including Biggie Smalls life story in detail.

Biggie Smalls Early Life

Biggie Smalls, popularly known as "The Notorious B.I.G.," was a well-known hip-hop musician and the face of gangsta rap on the East Coast. He was shot and murdered on March 9, 1997.

Christopher George Latore Wallace's birthdate was on May 21, 1972. His birthplace was in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were both from the Caribbean island of Jamaica: his mother, "Voletta," was a preschool teacher, while his father, Selwyn, was a local Jamaican politician and welder. Selwyn left the family when Biggie was 2 years old, but Voletta worked two jobs to send her son to one of the private schools, which is the Roman Catholic Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and whose alumni include former Primark CEO, both Arthur Ryan and Rudy Giuliani.

But Biggie has subsequently transferred to the George Westinghouse Career and the Technical Education High School; alumni include the rappers D.M.X., Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z. Biggie, who excelled in English, was frequently absent from Westinghouse and dropped out at the age of 17 in 1989.

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According to an interview he gave to the New York Times in 1994, he began peddling narcotics at the age of 12 along the streets of his mother's apartment on St. James Place, earning the nickname "Big" because of his plus-sized girth. Voletta worked very long hours and had no inkling of the activities of her son. After dropping out of school, Biggie ramped up his drug peddling and was soon in problems with the authorities. In 1989, he received a five-year probationary sentence after being arrested on the weapons possession charges. And, then, in the following year, he was arrested for violating the probation. After a year, he was charged with dealing cocaine in North Carolina and spent nine months in jail reportedly while waiting to make bail.  This is Biggie Smalls early life.

Bad Boy Records

Biggie started rapping when he was a teenager to entertain his neighbours. He produced a demo tape after being released from jail under the alias Biggie Smalls, a reference to a gang boss from the 1975 film Let's Do It Again as well as a tribute to his childhood nickname. He holds no serious plans to pursue a music career — "It was fun just hearing myself on the tape over beats," he said later in an Arista Records biography — The tape, however, made its way to The Source magazine, who was so pleased with Biggie that they featured him in their Unsigned Hype section in March 1992, Biggie was then invited to record among the other unsigned rappers.

Sean "Puffy" Combs, a producer and A&R executive who worked for the major urban label Uptown Records — he started there as an intern in 1990 — became aware of this track. Biggie got a record deal thanks to Combs, but he quit the business soon after due to a feud with his boss, Andre Harrell. Combs went on to start his own record label, Bad Boy Records, and by the middle of 1992, Biggie had joined him.

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Uptown published the songs that Biggie made during his brief stay with the label, before he had a chance to put anything out on the Bad Boy, with a remix of Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" at the time of August 1992 that featured a guest verse from The Notorious B.I.G. (after a lawsuit, he had been forced to change his recording name; though he continued to be widely called Biggie). The Notorious BIG's debut single as a solo artist, "Party and Bullshit," was released under the label in June 1993.

Friendship With Tupac

In the same year, as he worked on the music for his debut album, for the first time, Biggie Smalls met Tupac. Their meeting, as described in Ben Westhoff's book Original Gangstas, took occurred at a party hosted by an L.A. gangster. drug dealer They drank, ate, and smoked together, and Tupac is already a popular recording artist, having been given a Hennessy bottle by Biggie, who was then unknown outside of New York.
 

Tupac later coached Biggie anytime they met up, and Biggie even requested if Tupac would be his manager at one point. "Nah, stick with Puff," Tupac is reported to have said. "He'll make you into a star," says the narrator. Biggie was particularly worried about money at the time since T'yanna, his daughter with high-school lover Jan, had just been born in August. Also, it has been reported that Biggie went back to the drug dealing work at this point until Combs learned what he was up to and that made him stop.

Biggie and Michael Jackson, More Legal Problems

Biggie's next album release arrived on August 29, 1995, as part of the group Junior MAFIA (which is an acronym for Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes). He'd created a group to train up-and-coming rappers, including Lil' Kim, with whom he'd have an affair. Also, in the same year, he became the only hip-hop artist to collaborate with Michael Jackson for the song "This Time Around."

In September 1995, Biggie started working on his second studio album and continued into the following year. But, there would be more trouble than expected. He was arrested in March 1996 after chasing the two autograph hunters holding a baseball bat in Manhattan and threatening to kill them; he was sentenced to 100 hrs of community service. A few months later, police raided his house in New Jersey, and they found 50 grams of marijuana and 4 automatic weapons. In the same year, in the summer, he was charged with beating and robbing a friend of a concert promoter at a nightclub located in New Jersey. And after that, in the fall, again he was arrested, and this time it was for smoking marijuana in his car in Brooklyn.

Death of Tupac

In Las Vegas, On September 7, 1996, his former friend, "Tupac" was shot dead. None have ever been charged with Tupac's murder, but due to the ongoing West Coast vs. East Coast rap beef that Biggie and Tupac had come to symbolise, as well as Tupac publicly blaming Puffy and Biggie for his non-fatal shooting in 1994, there were some who believed that the East Coast rap kingpins were responsible.(Both Puffy and Biggie strenuously denied their involvement, including the other key suspects who have since emerged.)