“When Jay-Z said that line on ‘Dead Presidents,’ ‘N-– take a freeze off my kneecap / N- believe that,’ Big was like, ‘Yo, he got me.Yeah. Big used to say, ‘Yo, that n- nicer than me.’”Ĭease mentioned that the release of Jay-Z’s hit single “Dead Presidents II” was what made Biggie realize he had been beaten. “Big wasn’t afraid to tell that Big thought he was doper than him. “Big met at the Palladium and they bonded just on some G s- because they respected each other as men and they respected each other as artists,” he said. revealed what Big Poppa really thought about Jay-Z’s rap skills after his debut in an Instagram Live with Smoke DZA. In 2016, Lil’ Cease - one of Biggie’s longtime friends and a member of his group Junior M.A.F.I.A.
Included Real Audio of Oral Sex on 1 of His Songs The Notorious B.I.G. He’s like, ‘I’m not gonna be the guy that’s gonna be here writing when this guy can do that.’ Even though I told a bunch of times, ‘He don’t write his rhymes down,’ he thought it was impossible that he could say rhymes that good without writing them down.” “I was like, ‘I told you: he don’t write no rhymes.’ And from that point, Big stopped writing rhymes. “Big is like mystified,” Kent remembered. And like his previous version, he rapped his verses entirely from memory. Jay-Z asked Kent to play the beat for nearly 20 minutes, then went into the booth and changed all his lyrics from everything he had already recorded. “You don’t really have to talk in those moments.” It wasn’t even like they had a conversation they just started to laugh, clap hands - because there was an insane amount of respect for each other’s craft,” he recalled. In a 2016 interview with VladTV, DJ Clark Kent, an early collaborator of both Jay-Z and Biggie’s, recalled when the two iconic rappers first met: at the studio session to record “Brooklyn’s Finest.” Biggie Smalls | Larry Busacca/WireImage The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie released his smash debut album Ready to Die in 1994 and revitalized New York hip-hop with iconic songs such as “Juicy,” “Big Poppa,” and “Gimme the Loot.” Two years later, Jay-Z released his debut album Reasonable Doubt, which contained hits such as “Dead Presidents II” as well as “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a collaboration with Biggie himself. Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes even once got in a rap battle in the cafeteria, and Jay-Z won.īoth Jay-Z and Biggie are proud of their Brooklyn roots and their rise to the top of the game in the mid-1990s. They were classmates with another iconic Brooklyn rapper: Busta Rhymes.
Jay-Z and Biggie both dealt crack cocaine to make money as teenagers and both attended George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School in downtown Brooklyn. New York City was a notably dangerous place at the time, and Bed-Stuy was especially known for violence and crime. Jay-Z grew up in housing projects in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, while Biggie grew up a few blocks away. Jay-Z and Biggie go way back to before they were even rappers. Jay-Z | Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G.