The Notorious B.I.G.

Bio

The Notorious B.I.G. died on March 9, 1997, in Los Angeles, after he was shot in a drive-by outside a Vibe magazine party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. He was 24. He had released one studio album. His second album, Life After Death, came out sixteen days later. The case is, as of 2026, officially still unsolved. The LAPD investigation has been pursued and abandoned and re-pursued multiple times. The most credible reporting (Randall Sullivan's LAbyrinth, multiple LA Times investigations) points at involvement by a former LAPD officer and connections to Suge Knight, but nothing has produced charges. The case may not resolve in our lifetime.

He was born Christopher George Latore Wallace on May 21, 1972, in Brooklyn, raised by his mother Voletta Wallace in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was a quiet, big, smart kid who started rapping in middle school. By his late teens he was hustling crack on the Fulton Street corners and writing rhymes in between. Mister Cee recorded a demo of his and passed it to The Source's "Unsigned Hype" column. Sean Combs, then an A&R at Uptown Records, heard it and signed him. When Combs was fired from Uptown and started Bad Boy Records in 1993, Biggie was the first artist signed.

Ready to Die came out on September 13, 1994. It is one of the most important debut albums in any popular music genre. The voice is the thing first. Biggie's voice is one of the few in rap that you cannot mistake for anybody else's: deep, slow, conversational, slightly amused. The flow is one of the best in the genre's history. The lyrics work as both crime narrative and confession. "Juicy." "Big Poppa." "Warning." "Suicidal Thoughts." The album sold five million copies. It made him, briefly, the biggest rapper in America.

The Tupac beef escalated through 1994-1996. Both rappers said extraordinary, often regrettable things on records. The shooting of Tupac at Quad Studios in November 1994 (which Tupac publicly blamed on Biggie and Sean Combs, who both denied involvement) was the catalyst. Then Tupac was killed in September 1996. Six months later, Biggie was killed.

Life After Death came out on March 25, 1997, sixteen days after his death. The album is, depending on which fan you ask, either his masterpiece or the moment the production overwhelmed the writing. Multi-platinum, multiple radio singles, briefly the most commercially successful posthumous rap release ever recorded.

He has been gone for almost thirty years. Brooklyn has named a corner after him. Multiple subsequent generations of rappers have studied his cadence to learn how to swing a heavy syllable count over a relaxed beat. The catalog is twelve months long, plus features. It is also still the upper bound for what big-voiced storytelling rap can be. He should have had more time. He did not.