← Slow Burn
Slow Burn
Biggie and Tupac | Epilogue: Got a Story to Tell
00:45:13
Listen to the some of the extended interviews and stories we couldn't fit into this season.
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- [00:08]
A
Hi, I'm Chow Tu, and today I'm giving you a preview of the Slate plus bonus episodes we've been making all season for Slow Burn. In each episode, I've chatted with host Joel Anderson and producer Christopher Johnson about the making of the series, and we dig more into some of the stories and themes that they can uncover in the main episodes. Then we get to hear extended interviews with some of the significant players from the time people, people who really knew Tupac and Biggie, who experienced everything in real time, and who provide more insight and background to the story, including one of Tupac's personal attorneys, some of the journalists who interviewed Tupac and Biggie during their feud, and others who became experts on the two rappers and the whole culture and scene of the time. If you're a fan of this season of Slow Burn, you'll really enjoy going more in depth with these bonus episodes. And you should know that the series would not be possible without the support of Slate plus members. So sign up today and show your support. It's only $35 for the first year, and you won't hear any ads on any Slate podcast. You can sign up now@slate.com slowburn okay, here's your preview. This first clip comes from our first bonus episode where we get to hear some background on Joel and Christopher themselves. And we get to hear from Sean Holly, an attorney to the stars who once represented Tupac and who got to see a fun and personal side to the rapper. Okay, so I want to introduce you guys a little bit. Can you talk a little bit more about your backgrounds and what you guys have worked on?
- [01:26]
B
Yeah, Well, I am originally from Houston, Texas, went to college at Texas Christian University. Go Frogs. And have worked all around. My background is mostly in print or online, so I started the Associated Press, Shreveport Times, Tampa Bay Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Tampa Bay Times again. Then I moved to New York in 2013 to work for BuzzFeed. And that's kind of where, you know, a lot of things really took off for me. I was sort of a national news correspondent, so I covered, like, Ferguson and the Baltimore Uprising, a lot of that stuff there. And that just was, like, a lot of work that got a lot of attention. I was like, yo, like, my career was built on, like, tragedy in some ways. And so I try to be really thoughtful about the work I do and, like, not, you know, just know that, like, this could have been anybody, anybody else could have got assigned to those stories. I just happened to have gotten it. So, anyway, after that, I got Burnt out and decided I wanted to cover college football for two years at espn. And then Slate came to me with this opportunity.
- [02:27]
C
Can I say something right quick?
- [02:28]
A
Of course.
- [02:28]
C
This dude is being ridiculously humble, which is consistent. But, you know, I remember when I first was looking into taking this position and working with you and of course did my background research, and I found the story that you did. We talked about it on the phone. Your story about Jabbar during Katrina.
- [02:46]
D
Right.
- [02:46]
C
So tragedy. But the way that you told that story told me everything I needed to know about, like, my trust for you handling this kind of a story.
- [02:54]
D
Right.
- [02:55]
C
So handling the story that we're working on now, that it wasn't gonna be a sensational project and certainly the editors have control over that. But the host also, in my experience anyway, does have a lot of. A lot of say, so as he or she should in driving the direction and the voice and the tone and the way that you treated the experience of that black man in the middle of this, like, legal and weather, not even really weather, but like this chaos, you know, told me a lot of the stuff I needed to know.
- [03:22]
B
So, man, Chris is being much too kind, and I'm gonna wait for him to say what his background is before I do. The self take advantage. That's right.
- [03:30]
A
All right, well, let's hear it, Christopher.
- [03:32]
C
Yeah. So I was born and raised in and out of Washington, D.C. between D.C. and Montgomery County. I grew up on go go and D.C. punk and 80s R&B and music in my mother's fried chicken. I mean, that's what raised me. And I went to Rutgers University and then I went on to grad school. I'm kind of in my previous life, an academic, PhD dropout, that kind of stuff. Dropped out and went to work for npr. My first media gig was at NPR in dc. I was a producer, kind of your, like, grunt producer at Morning Edition. I did that and then went out to NPR west in la. Started a couple shows out there day to day, and then News and notes, which was NPR's Black Show. The Black show.
- [04:23]
B
Program.
- [04:24]
C
Yeah, program. I did that for a while, and then I decided to go freelance and move to Southeast Asia for a little while and lived there and bounced around and then came back to the States and conceived and wrote this podcast called 100 to 1 the Crack Legacy, which was looking at some of the more contemporary roots of police violence in black communities, anti black violence in black communities. There are lots of explanations for it, but we were looking at the war on Drugs as this kind of like catalyst for a lot of this. The 80s war on drugs did that and then hopped up. WNYC was there for a little bit and did a co hosted a podcast called the Realness about the late rapper Prodigy, half of the legendary rap group Mobb Deep, and his lifelong struggle with sickle cell anemia. I did that with now Slate's Mary Harris. Right.
- [05:14]
A
Bringing the team back.
- [05:15]
C
Exactly. But getting the band back together. And now I'm here.
- [05:18]
B
First of all, I'd heard the Realness. And so when we go talk to people about what this podcast is and like, who we are, I hate to say a lot of people have not heard of Slate. We don't have any credibility necessarily with certain people in certain communities. Right. You know what I mean? It's just because they haven't heard us, they don't know who we are. And I'm not like a hip hop head. Like, I'm not a dude who's done music journalism before. Like, you know what I mean? Like, so talking with Christopher, I was like, yo, like, that is the person I need to like, right? If we're going to do this, we need to have somebody has, like, bona fides in this game. And like, the Realness is that, like, it was like that sort of a game changing, like, of a project. And I was like, yo, like, all right, you may not think I know what the hell I'm talking about, but look at him.
- [06:03]
C
He doesn't either.
- [06:05]
E
Stop.
- [06:07]
B
No, I was like, yo, Christopher knows exactly what he's doing. And it's just like I just trusted him implicitly in his judgment.
- [06:13]
C
And so Slate plus episode one, a love fest.
- [06:16]
D
Yeah, exactly.
- [06:17]
B
Right.
- [06:18]
C
Yeah, it is.
- [06:18]
A
Well, so how are you trying to sell the show? How do you explain the show to them then?
- [06:22]
C
It depends. But I'll sort of start with some of the questions that people raise, especially people who have told this story a lot and people who both have told the story a lot, and they've told it because they were close to one or both of the subjects of the podcast. They're close to Pack and or Biggie. And so for them, there are two challenges. One is that they've told the story a lot and they have a deep kind of professional understanding of these guys. Like, they understand their impact on the world, but they also had personal relationships with them. And maybe a third thing, which is that if you're black in America, you're also thinking about what it means to have two black men killed at very young ages. And whether they're celebrities or not that's just the thing that we live with. I mean, America lives with that. But black people process that in a very kind of immediate way. And so that kind of triple thing for a lot of people, they're just like, I don't want to go there anymore. Like, I've been going there for 20 some odd years. So the way that we try to sell it is honestly, again, it depends on the source. But part of it is saying we are not interested in reinvestigating their deaths. We're certainly interested in that story. But our goal is not just to sit around and kind of go through an autopsy and talk about, you know, the kind of forensics around how they died and are they still, Are they actually dead and that kind of stuff. It's promising people that we're gonna go into their lives and talk about the role that they played in American culture and the role that they played as fathers, as husbands, as artists, you know what I mean? As dudes in the community and as complicated, problematic sometimes men and black men, because it's true. We're not just doing that to sell it. That's what we are interested in those kinds of things. Because especially with the life of two, that's complicated enough. Like he did so much and touched so much and caused so much stuff in his very short life. There's a lot of drama there just in his living, setting aside how he died. And for a lot of people, that seems to open them up and it also gives them a sense of trust in us that at least you're thinking the right way or you're thinking about it in a different way.
- [08:37]
B
They're not corpses to us, you know what I mean? We're trying to make them three dimensional, whereas, like they've been sort of reduce it like these two dimensional Tupac, Biggie, that they represent like this one singular moment in American history and that's it. And like we're trying to get a little bit beyond that and talk to the people whose lives they touch, talk about how they touch their lives and all of our lives and all of the music we even listen to today. Like, the impact they've had on that, because there is that that we have to explore. It's like, yo, like there are books, documentaries, TV miniseries that are dedicated exclusively just to their deaths. And like, that just seems boring to me. You know what I like that ground has been heavily trod. And again, we're not running from that. There is going to be a piece of the podcast, but that's not it. And, you know, hopefully by the time we get to it, you will have been so interested in everything else that you'll be like, okay, we'll see how this ties into everything else. But like, that is not. Like, that was not why we wanted to do this. And that is not the only story we hope to tell here.
- [09:38]
E
My name is Sean Holley. I am a partner at Kinsella, Weitzman, Iserkamp and Al Dacert, which is an entertainment litigation and business litigation firm in Santa Monica. I worked at Johnnie Cochran's office for a long time. I was part of the O.J. simpson defense team. And I started out my career as a Los Angeles county public defender. And I consider myself a public defender at heart.
- [10:03]
B
At this point, you know, 2019, you have sort of the distance to be like, well, there is this perception of Tupac as like a one man crime band or, you know, whatever. But at the time when you get a call from a national legal coordinator and, and I'm assuming you'd heard of Tupac just via movies, music, whatever, like, what were sort of your perceptions of him before you'd even had a chance to meet him? And then you get this call.
- [10:27]
E
I don't know that I had any perception of him in particular. I don't think that I thought he was bad. Notwithstanding the fact that he was coming to me through someone who obviously was shepherding out a whole bunch of cases that he had. I don't think that that caused me to make any presumpt about him. But I'm pretty sure that I met him shortly after that. Whatever I would have thought would have immediately gone out the window because there was like no more amazing, brilliant, charming, fabulous person than he. So whatever you might have thought, you know, if it was bad, you wouldn't think that anymore.
- [11:10]
B
Wow. Well, can. Can you tell me or what? You remember that, that first meeting and sort of the circumstances of it. Did he come to your office or did you go to meet him or how did that work?
- [11:19]
E
He came to. He was one of these people who, you know, almost is like glowing. They're so special, you know, and was just incredibly charming and, you know, a little flirtatious, which wasn't a bad thing either. But I think that we just kind of went through the cases. I think that there were probably a couple that were pending at that time that I was gonna be dealing with. And you know, it's so crazy when I think about that time. Cause it's so different now. My pract, when I'm representing celebrities I mean, there has to be, like, an entire plan as to how to get in and out of wherever you're going. I mean, there's just. So this was, you know, before TMZ or any of that. So, I mean, I could, like, meet him at the place where his deposition was gonna be taken, which might be some office in Century City, you know, right outside the office building, like, the grassy area. You know what I mean? Like, it's just crazy when I think about that. Cause that could never in a million years happen. Now, I remember one occasion. Cause he would always be late. And so finally, on this one occasion, I'm like, I'm not getting there on time because I'm sick of him being late and me waiting and me admonishing him every time this happens. And then, of course, that was the time that he was on time, because he was showing me that he could be on time, and then I was late. So I guess in that respect, we were not really in sync.
- [12:46]
B
So, like, was he alone when you admit when you met with him? Because really?
- [12:50]
E
Yeah, now he would just be. He would just be alone, which is part of what's so crazy about it. Like I said, that just could not happen now at all, ever.
- [12:58]
B
Well, you know what? It doesn't even sound like him either. Right. Because having talked to people, it sounded like there were always dudes around. Right. Whenever he moved. But on the occasions you were around him, he would just come over by himself.
- [13:11]
E
Yeah. I mean, maybe a dude, like, you know, dropped him off somewhere and picked him up somewhere, but where he would be meeting me, he would be, like, rolling up alone, just walking up.
- [13:22]
B
Crazy.
- [13:23]
D
Wow.
- [13:23]
E
Which is crazy. Yeah, it's great, really, what I found with Tupac. And then later, you know, I represented Lindsay Lohan for many years. I saw a similar thing in representing both of them, which is that there would be a perception out in the world that with respect to both of these people, that they are somehow bad actors, but they have a lot of money. So I think that they both, in many respects, were targets for, you know, I was gonna say predators. And I could say. And I'll be a little kinder. People who thought that, you know, this is kind of a perfect opportunity to get something here, because everybody's gonna presume that this person, be it Tupac or Lindsay, did whatever it is. I'm alleging. And because these people have a lot of money, they'll be willing to write a check to make it all go away.
- [14:12]
B
You know, when we started this project, I never anticipated that Tupac would be analogous to Lindsay Lohan, but that's.
- [14:22]
A
This next clip comes from our third bonus episode, which is an interview with the hip hop journalist Matty C. Who really got to know Biggie after featuring him in his unsigned hype column in the Source. He gets into the dynamic between Biggie and Tupac and the role that hip hop media played in their feud. So episode three, this is a pretty big one. We start off where we left off at Quad Studios and Tupac getting shot. And so on the other side, Biggie's been making music, he's been getting some hype. He gets linked up with Puffy. And so after Quad Studios, he releases a song called who Shot Ya? So there's a lot of ambiguity about whether the song was aimed at Tupac or not. So do we know what people at that time were thinking about that song?
- [15:03]
B
Well, it's important to remember that the beat for who Shot Ya appeared on Mary J. Blige's album called My Life, which was an album that was released before the Quad shooting. And the beat appears on the song called the K. Murray Interlude. And it's like a 22 second clip of a rapper named Keith Murray just rapping over that beat for who Shot you. Right? And so Nasheem Mirik is the producer, and you hear him in this episode talk about making that beat. So he's the one that knows that that beat was made well before the Quad shooting. And at first, you know, Puff wanted Keith Murray to do a longer song over that beat. Didn't work out, as we mentioned in the podcast. And then they tried to bring in LL Cool J, who was supposed to do something with the beat. Puff didn't like that. And so they said, well, hey, what? Let's give it to Biggie. And so Biggie took it and put out the song that we know now is who Shot you? This is all done before the Quad shooting. The problem was they got released a few months later after the Quad shooting as a B side to Big Papa. And so, like, it's hard to argue that the song was made with Tupac in mind, but it's understandable if you think the timing of the release was made with him in mind too. Like, if you want to be uncharitable and say they released it as a way to taunt Tupac, you could argue that. But the song was not made with Tupac in mind. And so if you were Tupac, you probably would have thought it was about you. It makes sense, right? Like, hey, I thought these guys were the ones that shot me. And now they're taunting me with this song. But I think the general thought around the music industry was that it was either extraordinarily flagrant at best or insensitive at worst.
- [16:37]
A
Could it have been aimed at anybody else?
- [16:40]
B
No. I mean, you know, it's just important to remember. And so Christopher knows because he's steeped heavily in this culture. I mean, man, shooting people in songs is a staple of hip hop, you know what I mean? Like, it's not. It's not unusual to, like, talk about, you know, hypothetical violence against random assailants and enemies and haters or whatever, you know what I mean? So I think it's just the timing of it and because the title just seems, like, specifically tailored to what happened to Tupac, because there was mystery around it, theoretically. Right. They like Tupac, who shot you, dude, you know, but, you know, nah, that's just a par for course in hip hop, you know, talking about shooting people, man, you know.
- [17:18]
A
Yeah.
- [17:18]
C
And it's interesting. This only just occurred to me, but. Well, let me just wonder aloud about whether or not in Tupac's music and sort of Tupac's version of hip hop, he's literal in a way that Biggie isn't necessarily literal. Of course, there are songs that are autobiographical, and there's autobiographical elements of Biggie's music, but part of the artistry that is in Biggie's music is not being quite as sort of literal and blunt in his language as Tupac's music is. And I say that really, not knowing Tupac's music that, well, it may not be true, but what I know of Tupac's music, and it's in fact, like, you know, one of the things I think he's known for is just being very direct.
- [18:02]
A
Yeah.
- [18:03]
C
Not that Tupac didn't get that, you know, what hip hop was, and that there's all kind of versions of hip hop along the spectrum of very literal to extremely abstract. But when you're in the kind of vulnerable position that he's in and he already has these reasons to suspect that these guys might be coming for him, it's both easy for him to imagine that this might have been directed to him and also for this to feed his paranoia or his kind of confusion or whatever you want to call it around that time, because it's just abstract enough for him to just panic, basically, and to sit and sort of worry.
- [18:38]
A
Yeah, we talked about his paranoia in the first episode.
- [18:41]
C
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maddie C. Matteo Capalongo AKA Maddie C. Joined up with the guys at the Source and eventually started writing this unsigned hype column, which became really like a kind of this beautiful portal for a lot of artists who were trying to get on and get noticed in a. That was rapidly on the rise and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed. And so Matty C and his colleagues had found a way to bring attention to artists who were still, I think, represented an element of hip hop that they still wanted to shine some light on, which was there are still artists out there who want the same shot that the other artists who are now big artists got when they were little artists, you understand what I'm saying, to still keep that part of hip hop fresh, which is unsigned hype. And, you know, unsigned hype became sort of that portal for artists like Eminem towards the end of the 90s, for DMX, for this group called Poetical Profits, which became Mobb Deep. And also for. For Biggie and Cannabis and Cannabis Cannot Bust.
- [19:58]
F
Right.
- [19:58]
C
And Saphir from Hobo Junction.
- [20:01]
B
Right, right, right.
- [20:02]
A
And I mean, like, pre Internet, these magazines were basically how, like, music news and gossip was spread nationwide then.
- [20:10]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Source is interesting to me for. Well, for lots of reasons. I had a subscription to the Source because there was really was nothing like it. Old folks like me love to say things like this. It's hard to remember and imagine a time before we had Google, the Internet and, you know, all these kinds of things, but in. But real talk, it's kind of true. Like, and not only that, but before hip hop was so big that it had like all of these different kinds of magazines and media covering it. There were fanzines, as a Source writer that we spoke to, Ken Amayo reminded us there were all these fanzines at the time, but like a journalistic outlet that would treat hip hop like a genuine music and cultural form and really take on not just talking about the artists and the music, but the issues around them and whatnot. And the Source did that. And this is this kind of like, first wave of hip hop writers coming through. And, you know, it's interesting, Joel, like, several people have said to us, like your Kevin Powells and Maddie C And other folks have. And Kierna Mayo also have all mentioned, like, you know, they were the first wave of artists to get on. And then as like, hip hop journalism really became a thing. Like, writer. Writers come on board and knock everyone else out the box. Like, people who really, you know, were going to, like, journalism schools. And like, I won't say Real writers, but people with just a different kind of caliber of a command of the language, you know, culture.
- [21:38]
B
So, yeah, no, I mean, growing up, those writers were. I mean, Dream Hampton is somebody whose name I've known for, you know, 25, 30 years of my life. You know what I mean? Like, that's a name that is well known to me as many rappers from the 90s or Bones Malone. Like, that was a guy I, like, really looked up to as a kid. And, you know, talking about, like, the influence that those magazines had, you know, I think about Vibe. Like, I remember when I got Vibe at my house, and I want to say that Rosie Perez was on the COVID I don't know if this was the pilot episode or something like that. And it just looked like. It looked unlike any magazine that I ever held in my hands before. Just the care and the journalism that they applied to artists that I cared about that I had never seen anywhere else. Oh, man. Like, this is one feature that was in five. It was called 20 Questions. And my dudes over at Very Smart Brothers, they called vibes 20 questions, the first black Twitter, right? Like, it'd be like, you know, why was such and such seen at the. At the club, seen at the tunnel with so and so? You know, that kind of stuff. You know, it was just like, there was no way to satiate your curiosity about your favorite artist then. Like, I knew nothing about the rappers and the black celebrities that they didn't want us to know. Like, maybe Ebony might do a feature. Maybe you might learn some tidbit during an interview on Yo. MTV Raps, but there was just no other way. And Vibe and the Source were like the first outlets that sort of gave us a peek behind the curtain so that we could see what these artists were doing back then.
- [23:10]
F
This is Matty C. I am Maddie C. Mateo Capital. Wongo is my full name former editor at Source magazine. The Unsigned Hype column was the column. I wrote that Source. And after the Source, I worked A and R at Loud Records.
- [23:27]
B
When did you get a chance to meet him then, Big? When did.
- [23:29]
F
Well, I was. Coincidentally, I moved a block away from him, like, within a couple of months. Because out of the blue, you know, my friend Chris Wilder, who was at the Source as well, just recommended his spot. Cause it was like, nearly half what I was paying in the Lower east side. And I was like, boom, I'll take it. And it was in Brownstone on Grand and Gates, which is about two blocks away from Big's house. And so a few days after that, I was just walking down the street like, yo, we ran into each other, you know what I mean? Are you big? Are you mad? Oh, boom, yo, you know, let's go roll something up. We went and hung out and. And then like pretty much every day after that, I would see him on the way to the train. His block was on the way to the train station. So almost every day on the way to the train, on the way home, we bump heads.
- [24:12]
B
Oh, wow. He seems like a sweetheart. Like, he seems like, like, like one.
- [24:15]
F
Of the nice sweetheart of the block. Yeah, it was really an amazing sight to see. You know, here's this big dark skinned, you know, ill looking dude on the corner. Like, you would think he scares people off the block. When in fact you see so many people get off the subway and walk.
- [24:31]
D
By like, hi, Biggie.
- [24:32]
F
All these girls, like, hi, Biggie. Like, you know, he's got this personal thing with each one of them and you're like, wow. You know, he's just one of those people that just had that couple little lines of small talk that, you know, makes you remember him and just like, you know, a charisma.
- [24:47]
B
He was a black all star, basically.
- [24:49]
F
Definitely, man. He was the mayor of the block, Mary St. James for sure.
- [24:53]
D
Wow.
- [24:54]
B
So you hadn't written the unsigned hype column by this point, right?
- [24:57]
F
I don't think it was published yet, but I probably had written it. He was actually pretty pissed off because I had a line in the article that said his rhymes are fatter than he is. And so he was picking a beef with me actually for that line.
- [25:11]
B
Oh, really? What did he say?
- [25:12]
F
Like, yo, what's up with that? Why you have to say that, man?
- [25:14]
B
Yo, what the fuck you call me, fat man? So you write the unsigned hype column. It comes out and like you've told the story a million times, but maybe our listeners hadn't heard it. But you get a call from Puffy at Uptown, is that right?
- [25:28]
F
Yeah, that's right, that's right. So the article I'm not sure had even come out yet, but I had written it and I got a call from him. And I knew exactly why, because I also was the news editor and I also did something for radio called the Weekly Word, where I wrote like little blurbs for radio stations nationwide to kind of announce little news items. And one of the news items I had just put out was DMCA signed a $50 million deal with Uptown Records. And this was humongous. And even though Uptown was mostly R and B, we knew Puff was there. We Knew Father MC knew he was a rap, you know, he was a hip hop head. And there was hope, you know, that some big dollars might get thrown at hip hop, you know. And so that was in the back of my head. I must ment. And I knew that was why he called, like, you know what I mean? Like, yo, what's up? We got some money. Like y' all got some shit, like. And I was like, yeah. He was like, come on up.
- [26:29]
C
Huh?
- [26:30]
B
So you went and met him up?
- [26:31]
F
I went to his office with the tape, yup.
- [26:33]
B
Really? And what was that like?
- [26:34]
F
First of all, I wasn't let into his office. And it was. It was Kim Porter, actually, that was at the door. Rest in peace, not letting me in. Then finally he came and he was like, nah, that's Matty. Let him in. So he came, got me, and went back there, and Misa was in the office eating sushi. I'll never forget that, too. And I played the demo. And again, my recollection immediately after playing it is him asking me about how he looks. It's a good sign, you know what I mean? He was excited, like. And everybody knew he was the fashion guy. That's what Puff did. He took an artist and he put the right outfit on him and, you know, that style. So he wanted to know what he was working with, right? You know, And I'm not really sure how to answer. I didn't bring a photo. I like to not have the photo. When I listen to demos, I always turn the shit over. I don't want to see a photo. I just want to hear it.
- [27:26]
C
Right?
- [27:27]
F
So I, you know, I wanted him to have the same experience. I just play it now. He just. He's got to know how he looks. He keeps pressing me. I like this. I'm like, yeah, he's. Is he fat?
- [27:35]
D
Yeah, he's fat. He's fat.
- [27:36]
F
He's like, is he fat? Boy's fat or heavy D fat? Like something in between, maybe? You know what? I'm trying to explain it. So this is the conversation that we're having as friendly. It's joking. And, yeah, that was it. Mr. C showed up in big a couple days later and bang, they did the deal.
- [27:54]
A
And finally, we have a clip from our seventh bonus episode, which features an interview with Cheo Hodari Koker, who interviewed Biggie the night before he died and later wrote a biography on him. He talks about what he thinks was in the future for both of the rappers. So there's a sense that in hindsight, Puffy And Biggie's trip to the west coast was probably a mistake. Like you said, it was about six months after Tupac's death. So had things died down by then or was anything happening in kind of the so called east vs West feud?
- [28:23]
B
So at this point, Tupac is dead, obviously. Suge was sent to jail for violating his parole for participating in that casino beatdown of Orlando Anderson. Like it violated the terms of his parole for an earlier assault charge. So Tupac's dead, Suge's in jail. Remember, Dre has left death row. Snoop is just now, you know, a few months after having been found not guilty on a murder charge. So in that way, whatever is left of death row isn't much. So it'd be understandable if Puffy and Biggie looked at that and said, hey, things are cool now. Things seem to be, you know, moving towards like peace and resolution. And there were even these events that called for an end of violence around that time. That was called the, as Christopher knows, the Hip Hop Day for Atonement was organized in New York by the Nation of Islam. This is like a few days, maybe a couple weeks after Tupac dies. And then even a few months later, Snoop and Puffy go on the Steve Harvey show to basically hug it out and say, hey, we're together. There's no beef, right? But Nasheem Myrick makes this point and it doesn't come up in the podcast, but like, nobody had really checked to see if the beef was over, you know what I mean? Like nobody. Like it's still not. A lot of time had passed before Biggie and Puffy go on this promore tour of California. And like what we would say back home is they didn't really give that bitch a chance to breathe, you know what I'm saying? Like, you gotta let the bitch breathe, you know what I'm saying? So they were like, they go right back out into the middle of this shit. They haven't really tested the waters to know if people are still pissed at them or not.
- [29:55]
A
Yeah, that's what it seems like.
- [29:57]
C
Yeah. And one of the things that we've heard from, I think Reggie Wright made this point. He was the head of death row security back in the day. He said that, you know, out of respect and also as a kind of matter of course and to just stay safe. Before you go into someone else's town as a crew, you call ahead as a kind, as a show of respect, you call them up and let them know, listen, I'm gonna be rolling around in your Town, just so you know.
- [30:21]
A
And everything's chill.
- [30:22]
C
Yeah. And we get up. I don't know. I can't say. I don't know if Puffy made that call or not. It's just yet another kind of. I hope that they took that precaution, but I don't know if they did.
- [30:32]
B
Well, you know, So, I mean, this will probably come up later in the podcast, but there are theories, allegations, rumors that Puffy had occasionally enlisted Crips as security as, like, street security in la. So, like, he could have made it okay with them, but that didn't make. That definitely did not make it okay with the Ma Piru, if you're rolling with the Southside Crips.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah.
- [30:57]
B
Right.
- [30:58]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And then Biggie releases a song going back to Cali on his next album. So how did that song come to be? Seems a little bit surprising.
- [31:06]
C
Yeah.
- [31:06]
A
The Cali anthem.
- [31:08]
C
Yeah. I mean, I have a couple thoughts about going back to Cali, which probably won't surprise you. Let's hear it. So, first of all, angel, you can check my facts on this, but we spoke with the legendary producer Ezymobi, who DJed our launch party seems like eons ago, but he. Because he'd worked with both artists and tons of other artists, he'd worked with both Tupac and Biggie and had a lot of affection for both of them as creators and as young men. He wanted to make a song that was like, let's squash this. Let's bring the coast together. Let's make a sound that invokes this kind of style that had become popular at least out of, like, the Death Row camp, you know? And this is like, when we talk about this a little bit in the podcast, this song from the funk group Zap. Yeah, right. More bounce to the ounce. And he's like, that kind of song was like an anthem for those west coast heads in the way that, like, Love is the Message by msfb, I think the group is called Was For Us on the east coast, at least in New York. So he's like, I'm gonna invoke that west coast sound. I'm gonna make this beat, and I'm gonna give it to Big, and I'm gonna let him do something with it. And if I remember the story right, Big kind of makes the song much faster than Eazymo B had expected. And he's like, oh, shit. Mo's like, oh, shit. I hope that Biggie didn't make something that's gonna antag.
- [32:29]
B
Yeah.
- [32:30]
C
Cause he didn't get to fact checking, you know, or like reveal, you know, like you see it as we say quality, control it. And it turns out that it's not. It's like a. It's a. It's a love letter. It's sort of a show of affection. But, you know, I have another thought. This is like down into the sort of trivia of hip hop.
- [32:49]
A
Yeah.
- [32:49]
C
Ten years earlier, this idea of going back to Cali. There was another hip hop beef that was going on 10 years earlier in rap. And it becomes this sort of defining beef in rap music. And this is between LL Cool J and Cool Modi from the Treacherous Three. The claim was. And in some ways it was also another kind of. Well, at one point was a one way beef. And then LL's not. He doesn't sit down through beefs like the way Biggie was like, okay, so Cool Modi lashes out at LL Cool J with how youw Like Me Now. And his claim is that LL Cool J had stolen his style and that he was disrespecting the, like, the elder statesman of hip hop and all that kind of stuff. So LL Cool J fires back, and he fires back with this song called Jack the Ripper. And Jack the Ripper was the B side to a single that LL had put out 10 years before, this version of Going Back to Cali called Going Back to Cali. So this is the second time that a song called Going Back to Cali becomes part of an expanded beef in hip hop music. It was funny because I remember when this song came out, the Biggie song came out, and I was like, he's invoking ll. I wasn't sort of thoughtful enough to be like, he's also invoking that beef, which he may or may not have been doing. But it is interesting that like, just a decade earlier and this song was also sort of part of this beef that had been raging.
- [34:09]
A
That's interesting. Not that long. I mean, 10 years. Not that long.
- [34:13]
B
It's a long time in hip hop.
- [34:14]
D
Right.
- [34:15]
B
Because 10 years a career can be over.
- [34:17]
C
It's true.
- [34:17]
B
You know, in 10 years. Right. I'm sure just us talking about this, there are people that will probably totally unaware that LL Cool J had it. Going back to Cali.
- [34:26]
C
Yeah.
- [34:26]
B
You know what I mean? And it sounds. I mean, like, at the time, it sounded like some groundbreaking shit because you can hear the Rick Rubin all over it.
- [34:33]
C
Absolutely.
- [34:33]
B
You know what I mean? Yeah. But like, I mean, 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, people probably have no idea, you know?
- [34:41]
C
Yeah. And it is a very different LL Cool J style. Like, he's rhyming, very mellow.
- [34:45]
B
It's a departure from the, you know, the LL Cool J style that, you know, that we. At least we grew up. Up.
- [34:51]
C
That's true. Because it's actually. Okay, never mind.
- [34:53]
B
Yeah, we get into ll.
- [34:57]
A
Do you know, you were such a.
- [35:00]
C
Well, I love Bigger and Deafer. That album was crazy.
- [35:04]
D
My name is Cheo Hodari Koker. I was the showrunner, executive producer, and creator of Marvel's Luke Cage. But before that, I cut my teeth as a hip hop journalist. I used to write for the Bomb Hip Hop magazine, rap pages, Vive the Source, xxl, and a lot of other publications.
- [35:28]
B
So when you first met him, you talk about meeting him at these three different points in your life. In his life, at least. And so, like, that first time on The Stoop on St. James. Do you mind sort of painting a picture for us, like, who he was and what that was like, meeting him for that first time.
- [35:44]
C
It was funny.
- [35:45]
D
Okay, so Carr drops me off right on St. James, and big is, you know, on his stoop, and he literally is like, just kind of holding court. He's just kind of chilling, you know? And we end up talking, and we're on St. James, and if you look up the street, you see Fulton Street. You look the other way is another street. Every other car that was passing on Fulton was playing a different track from Ready to Die. I mean, you would think it was like. Like a Biggie theme park. It was. It was crazy because that's how much he was just in the zeitgeist, so to speak, of what was happening. That's where that story came from. Like, in the middle of our interview, Trifon Larceny come up to him and try to borrow a gun so. So that they can rob somebody. And then he says he doesn't know where it is. And as soon. As soon as they leave, he's. I know exactly where the gun is. And he has this whole thing about how it's like he's trying to get these kids from around the way to leave with him as part of his entourage. Because now that he's about to tour and see the world, he's trying to get them out of the craziness of Brooklyn. He was charismatic. I mean, he was cool, he was funny, he was irreverent.
- [36:59]
B
He was just as colorful as the.
- [37:02]
D
Rapper whose tape I was obsessed with. And he was proud of the fact that he grew up in Brooklyn. And so when you Went to visit him and you would go to St. James, he's right there. You know, it's like, I'm not changing for shit was his mentality at the.
- [37:17]
B
Time, given all of that. Like, Puffy obviously had different instincts for him. So, like, what do you think of that partnership? Like, what sort of influence, if any, did Puffy have over Biggie?
- [37:29]
D
In that way, he loved Puff. I mean, Puff was responsible for changing his life. Puff was. Was responsible for telling him to rhyme about selling drugs instead of actually selling drugs and proving to him that it could be more lucrative to write about it than to actually let it. So he always credited Puff for that. But yeah, there was always a certain kind of disconnect. I mean, like, from the standpoint of Big All Day could do battle raps and didn't necessarily want to do Big Papa didn't necessarily want Juicy to be his first single. I mean, Big, he probably would have preferred Machine Gun funk. I mean, because his style at the time was really more, you know, Timberland boots and Carhartt and kind of dark street corner type shit, as opposed to, you know, glossy, let me look good in the club, you know, wearing a suede leather jacket, kind of big popping video things. Puffy really understood his expertise was giving rhythm and blues hip hop grit. Because Puffy didn't invent the R and B hip hop blend. I mean, you would have to really start talking about, like, Ron G and talk about other people with those early mixtapes that were really the first to kind of blend that them. But Puff realized, wait a minute, if I take this formula and I refine it and I kind of create this vibe or this feeling that we're going to call hip hop soul, I can sell more records because ultimately women are. Are the consumers that are actually buying records as opposed to their male counterparts who just like listening to records on the radio. So then when it comes to his records and it comes to his first singles, he's like, like, how do I package Big in a way that makes them appealing to women, makes them appealing to radio, and doesn't necessarily cut his street credibility, but then save the hardcore street records for the B sides and for the album itself. And that ultimately became, you know, the deal that he and Big made so that everybody was happy, is that like, if you give me Big Pop, if you give me Juicy, if you give me the single that I can sell to radio, you can always have the B side. You can go as gangster and as hard as you want, and that's how you get a B side, like, who shot you? You know, that's how you get, you know, the Biggie that would show up on mixtapes, like, some of the best Biggie Smalls records aren't official releases. It's those mixtape cameos that he would make, you know, like real niggas do real things. When he's rhyming over over all the Death Row Records songs. And had Big lived long enough for things to kind of accelerate. And Big had the opportunity to do, say, what Gucci Mane or what Lil Wayne has done with their mixtapes, where they just have a whole different phenomena, a whole different way of expressing themselves that have nothing to do with their quote unquote, official releases. I mean, Big would have taken to that like a fish to water because he was so prolific.
- [40:26]
B
Yeah, for people that, like, only remember him through, you know, top 40 hits, that sort of thing. Can you explain to people what made him so good and what made him so. So much of a standout relative to his peers? And even, I guess, you know, still high regard today.
- [40:42]
D
Part of the way to differentiate Big and Tupac is to talk about what they did differently. Tupac was a blues artist. I mean, he would just basically cut open his veins and bleed on the track. He had this way of encapsulating the pain and the soul of what was happening in the street. And even when he was telling somebody else's story, he would kind of personify it. And Pac was just so quick. Whereas Biggie was more like a jazz artist, like a bebop artist. I mean, yes. I mean, you know, Charlie Parker at times played the blues, but his approach was lyrically more intricate in terms of his rhyme patterns. The way that Biggie could embody a trap, the way that his storytelling style was different. When you look at how Big could change his style, basically using, like, his version of PSK and then to do, you know, Bone Thugs, Notorious Thugs, and then basically use their style to rhyme and then at the same time also have his own narrative style and then also have his own freestyle style. The thing that was interesting about Big was not only was he versatile rhythmically, not only could he basically change his style to match whatever beat was happening, there was a clarity to his vocals. There was a clarity to the way that he rhymed. It was almost like you could see subtitles when Biggie rhymes. And then, I mean, he would turn it on and off. I mean, so, for example, like, with a gangster narrative, like, somebody's gotta die, that's incredibly visceral. But then again, like, you Know, I got a story to tell is also incredibly visceral. The way that he breaks the story down, the way that he structures his story. I mean, like, I constantly steal from Big as a screenwriter just in terms of thinking of different perspectives to enter a scene. I still can't call him the best. And the only reason I still say Rakim is better is because Big said Rakim was better. But he's definitely top three, top four. Hands down. The way that I've always described it is that, like, Christopher Wallace was to Biggie, what Peter Parker was. A Spider Man. And essentially, Peter Parker's main fear is that Aunt May is gonna find out that he's Spider Man. And Christopher Wallace's biggest fear was that his mom was gonna find out that he was Biggie Smalls, not the rapper, but the kid selling drugs and the kid that was, you know, basically doing wrong, so to speak. And it was. He was constantly trying to balance these two different Personas. So the thing was, was that he was always kind of these contradictions. But the Biggie that I talked to, when we were in his hotel room, we were waiting to see him appear on the Soul Train Awards. So he's back in this chair. It's me, Greg Young, and Big. And Big has this room service pizza. Like, he had a. He had a big paunch, and he had. They had the pizza, like, leaned back. It was balanced on his stomach. And so he's kind of eating the pizza at the same time that we're talking. And he gets on the awards and watching it with him. The boos weren't really very loud. You couldn't really tell what they were saying. It didn't really seem like it was any big deal at the time. And he was talking about how he wanted to essentially buy a house in Atlanta. And he was talking about how he wanted to give Tiana away at her wedding, and he wanted to see CJ graduate from high school. And. And, you know, all these different things that he said wasn't going to happen if he was out there while. And what he was basically describing was that he realized that he could have a rap Persona, but that he could also live a different life that had nothing to do with that rap Persona. I mean, essentially, he kind of wanted to do what TI and Tiny are doing on their reality show where, you know, TI Makes records. And then at the same time, he's just got this domestic life with his kid. That was Big's dream, was he basically wanted to be the suburban soccer dad that occasionally made hip hop records. It's something that I constantly think about when I'm around my kids. Now. The life that I'm living is the life that Biggie Smalls dreamed about. It had nothing to do, you know, with being the world's biggest gangster, having these mansions and these women, or any of the kind of flashy gangster lifestyle stuff. It was a completely different thing.
- [45:04]
A
So if you want to hear the rest, Sign up for Slate plus now at slate.com slowburn that's slate.com slowburn thank you for listening.
- [45:16]
D
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