Notorious B.I.G. would have turned 50 years old on May 21st. In celebration of the day, we have a podcast that’s as big as his life and legacy.
LISTEN: Justin Tinsley discusses his upcoming book ‘It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him’
Justin Tinsley is the author of the upcoming book It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him and joined the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast to discuss his book. One of the first things he learned was that he only scratched the surface of who Biggie, real name Christopher Wallace, was as a person.
“I thought I knew everything about Biggie Smalls going into this,” Tinsley said. “After the research, after the reporting, after the interviews, it’s like wow man. You think you know a person until you really start to dig in on them and find out different parts of their life.”
One of the first interviews Tinsley conducted was with Hubert Sam, one of Biggie’s earliest and closest friends. “What struck me the most about this was, throughout our entire interview he never called him ‘Big’ or ‘Biggie.’ He always called him Chris.”
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That experience opened up Tinsley’s eyes to the sheer impact Wallace had on those closest to him. “For people like Hubert Sam, that was his first friend. They met in kindergarten,” he said.
“Finding out these stories about young Chris, who would come to kindergarten and talk about Country music that his mother would play around the house or movies they would watch together… Just the innocence of a child. That really struck me.”
Throughout the rest of the interview, Tinsley discusses Biggie’s rise to stardom, the impact he had on Hip Hop and the greater music scene at the time, and the legacy that he’s left behind.
Related
Recently, JAY-Z made waves when he hinted that there was a potential Hip Hop supergroup involving himself and the Notorious B.I.G.
JAY was featured on the new Pusha T track “Neck & Wrist” and had a line where he mentions a supergroup called The Commission. “They like, ‘If BIG was alive, Hov wouldn’t be in his position,'” JAY-Z raps. “If Big had survived, y’all would have got The Commission. Hov was gon’ always be Hov. It ’twas the universe will ’cause Allah said so, and now I’m here.”
Had The Commission ever come to life, the group would have included Lance “Un” Rivera, Diddy, Lil’ Cease, Charli Baltimore, JAY-Z, and Biggie. Yeah, that’s an all-star group if we’ve ever seen one.
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