Stray Shots: Remembering Biggie 20 Years Later

For a special edition of "Stray Shots," we take a stroll down memory lane and recall the first time we heard Biggie's "Ready To Die."

In this Ready To Die edition of “Stray Shots,” we recount our first time hearing Mr. Frank White and just how it changed us. They say that art is transformative, and after coming to the realization that 1990 was 24 years ago, you can’t help but think it to be true. Much has changed since then, and the effects of the last decade of the 20th century are always hotly debated. For Hip Hop, none possibly more than Biggie’s impact on the culture he helped push forward, his gritty depictions of New York street life, his eventual rise to superstardom, and the fall that accompanied it. That fall did not just snuff out one life, but two, both of them (B.I.G. and Tupac) heroes to us and villains to others. These kinds of differing perspectives used to be at the very core of all Rap debate. How does this person telling this tale relate to me? Further still, in our little microcosmic culture, how we regarded the best and the worst were always different, say, than how CBS or CNN saw them. We all felt like outsiders, then. Keepers of a secret that the wider world did not wish to understand.

Hip Hop, though, and Rap in particular have now become the dominant language of our social lives. It is the language of the web, and the language of the meme. It comes to you in traffic or in your kitchen. There is a lyric for almost every situation in your life, and whether you believe in this or that thing, chances are you believe in Hip Hop. The ones that don’t are now the minority. The Notorious B.I.G. was a huge reason for that shift. And, because life is strange, his death may have done more for Hip Hop’s future pop cultural appeal than his life. To see a collective mourn something that way, with such fervor, tends to allow other humans to feel some connection to others. Even those they may have previously shunned.

Whatever the case, since the death of the Notorious B.I.G. on March 9, 1997, Hip Hop has exploded. Sean “Puffy” Combs pushed forward, ushering in the “Shiny Suit Era” amongst other things, and while the king of New York wasn’t there to see it, all of Rap now lives in his shadow, having to answer to his work if talk of taking any thrones is possible. So here’s a look back at our own B.I.G stories, if only to inspire you to think about your own.