< Remembering Biggie Smalls And 'Ready To Die' 20 Years Later

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

When the Notorious B.I.G. released his debut album in 1994, he announced his arrival with the confidence of an old-school rapper.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JUICY")

BIGGIE SMALLS: (Rapping) It was all a dream. I used to read Word Up Magazine. Salt-N-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine. Hanging pictures on my wall.

CORNISH: Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, was just barely 22. This song, "Juicy," was the first single on what went on to be a multiplatinum album, "Ready To Die." Twenty years later, "Ready To Die" is considered an indisputable classic that launched the New York rap scene back onto the pop charts. Tragically, it's the only studio album released while Biggie Smalls was alive. He was murdered in 1997. We reached out to writer Dream Hampton to talk about their friendship and his legacy.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JUICY")

SMALLS: And if you don't know, now you know, you know.

DREAM HAMPTON: The first time I heard his voice, I was just blown away. It had so much information in his voice. It was authority. It was violence. It was sadness. Everything was in his voice. So I remember being blown away.

CORNISH: And, you know, his album, "Ready To Die," comes out. And at the time, the two words people used to describe it - paranoid but also hungry. Can you talk a little bit about his sound? And one song that comes to mind is the song "Things Done Changed."

HAMPTON: Well, I wouldn't necessarily call it paranoid. There was a lot of depression in this album. One of the things that Biggie described in "Things Done Changed" is the seismic shift that was happening in the black family, in the black community. And that was the impact of the billion-dollar crack industry.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS DONE CHANGED")

SMALLS: (Rapping) Back in the days, my parents used to take care of us. Look at them now. They even [bleep] scared of us. Callin' the city for help because they can't maintain. Damn, [bleep] done changed.

HAMPTON: Biggie was describing parents calling the police on their own children. He was talking about the onset of the war on drugs and basically what we have now - mass incarceration. So he was talking about going from backyard barbecues, where we would have block parties, and the whole, you know, neighborhood - young and old - would participate and this abrupt pivot and shift. I mean, I remember the 10th-graders that I had known who, you know, had all kinds of other interests - Prince, Michael Jackson. I remember them coming back after summer break and 11th grade being all about hip-hop and all about drug dealing. So that was a really sharp pivot in our community. And Biggie's describing that in "Things Done Changed."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS DONE CHANGED")

SMALLS: (Rapping) It's hard to being young from the slums. Eatin' five cent gums not knowin' where your meal's comin' from. And now the [bleep] gettin' crazier and major. Kids younger than me, they got the Sky Grand Pagers. Goin' outta town, blowin' up. Six months later all the dead bodies showin' up. It make me wanna grab the nine and the shottie, but I gotta go identify the body.

CORNISH: Now, talk a little bit about the quality of his rapping - the pace of it and sort of how that made him appealing to a pop audience.

HAMPTON: The biggest thing that Puff - P. Diddy, Sean Combs - told Biggie to do in the studio was to slow down. Like, a lot of East Coast rappers were speed rapping. But Biggie took it to another level. This was a literary album that read like a book.

CORNISH: Tell us a little bit about what his personality was like, 'cause you guys did have a friendship.

HAMPTON: Yeah, we did. We were neighbors. And we were friends for seven years. And I want to say that we talked almost every day from the day that I met him until the day that he died. He was so funny. But he was also really a good listener.

I remember I was in NYU, and I'd have all this homework and I'd have assignments because I was writing for Vibe and Village Voice and The Source. And he'd be my ear. He was a person that I ran my first ideas by. He was a person who I used as a first reader. He came to classes with me at NYU.

CORNISH: At this time you are like 19, 20, right? I mean...

HAMPTON: Yes. (Laughter).

CORNISH: You were all very young. That's something I sort of forget is that he was only his early 20s as well. But did he kind of have a foot in different worlds?

HAMPTON: Well, his mother was not only a teacher but a Jehovah's Witness.

CORNISH: This is Voletta Wallace.

HAMPTON: Yes. I remember reading "Ntozake Shange" with Biggie because his mom was an English teacher. He really liked to read things like Charles Dickens. So I had that literary kind of love of books in common with Biggie. I could challenge him on things. I absolutely challenged him in the studio and in our friendship on some of the sexism. I would've hoped that he would've outgrown some of that. It was a little cartoonish at times - his misogyny. But yeah, we were young.

CORNISH: How different was he from his persona? I mean, he had a lot of faces - a kind of Casanova - but also the gangster and the Charles Dickens reading Biggie is not one that most people knew.

HAMPTON: He shared something with me early on, and it really made me sad. And it was that people expect me to be a certain way, so sometimes I just give that person to them. We were trying to catch a cab once. I used to have to go out to get the cab. And Biggie would wait in the shadows. And I remember one cabdriver seeing him approach the cab. And he took off with my legs dragging.

Like, Biggie kind of had to grab me up from the car and almost save my life. And it was this visceral response that people had to him as a physical person in the world that informed a lot of how he turned around and acted towards them. I mean, at his core, he was a kind, generous, sensitive person. But he was seen in the world through this lens of anti-blackness as a predator.

CORNISH: Are there songs on the album that you think reflect that particular idea?

HAMPTON: Sure. "Gimme The Loot" is a perfect example of that - of him, you know, basically internalizing people's ideas about who he is in the world.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIMME THE LOOT")

SMALLS: (Rapping) Gimme the loot. Gimme the loot. Gimme the loot. Gimme the loot. Gimme the loot. Gimme the loot.

CORNISH: You know, so much of his legacy - Christopher Wallace, Biggie Smalls - it's tied to the hype and the drama that led up to and continued on after his death. I mean, this kind of public rivalry with Tupac Shakur, who was killed in 1996. And then Biggie's own death by a drive-by shooting. Does that, in effect, become the legacy of his career?

HAMPTON: I don't think so at all. I mean, I think it's important, for history's sake, to clarify that there wasn't a beef between he and Tupac. Tupac was beefing with him. There's no song. There's no article that you can go to where Biggie is talking about Tupac or lashing out at Tupac. It was a very one-sided so-called war. So that said, obviously it will always be a part of his story. But I think the music is the enduring thing. I think that when you hear Biggie play today, still, on the radio, in clubs, in cars as they drive by, it's not that narrative of a East Coast, West Coast rivalry. It's the music that still remains and affects people really deeply.

CORNISH: Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories about your friend. Dream Hampton, thanks so much for speaking with us.

HAMPTON: Thank you, Audie.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG POPPA")

SMALLS: (Rapping) 'Cause I see some ladies tonight that should be having my baby. Baby. Check it out.

CORNISH: Dream Hampton. She's a writer, filmmaker and activist. She joined us to talk about the Notorious B.I.G. album "Ready To Die." Its 20th anniversary is tomorrow. Biggie Smalls died three years after its release in a drive-by shooting.

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