I interviewed Drew Dixon, a former music industry executive, for this book. What misconceptions about Biggie did you set straight?
And Puffy did not like the fact that big was hustling while trying to make a rap career happen, because he knew if you mess up, then that’s it. He had a kid on the way and so he was hustling. There’s a really great story in the book about while Big was waiting on the contracts to come through that Puffy promised … he was recording music but he was also taking trips in and out of town to make sure that he had money. And hustling and dealing, a lot of those same principles apply to the music game as well, which is just as cutthroat as the drug game, if not more in some ways. Biggie Smalls was not Noriega or Pablo Escobar by any stretch of the imagination, but he was at least knee-deep in that game. And then, out of nowhere, you get thrust into the spotlight and you’re supposed to embrace the limelight.Ī lot of times people feel like some rappers exaggerate their street cred, but this was not the case with Biggie. When you’re out there hustling, selling crack, you try to stay as incognito as possible for obvious reasons. But it took him a while to get used to being famous. When Ready to Die dropped and all the adulation and the attention came towards him, he enjoyed some parts of it. He never went up to anybody, like, “Yo, here’s my demo tape.” … He wasn’t really necessarily the type of guy who flocked towards the spotlight. What was the most fascinating discovery that you made about Biggie in the process of writing this book?īig had a fear of rejection, which is why he never really even pushed his own music. So, as much as it is a biography of Biggie Smalls, it’s also a socio-economic examination of the world around him - hence the title that you get for this book.
How did you go about capturing the life of such a legendary figure like Biggie?īecause he’s such a folk hero in so many ways … I thought it was very fascinating to take a look at it from a macro standpoint, in terms of, like, what did the world look like when Biggie was making these decisions that he made? Yeah, sure, he sold some drugs in the ’80s and ’90s, but what does society look like at that point? Why did that force him to make the decisions that he made? Not just him, but an entire generation of young Black men and women.