Puff Daddy and Faith Evans release 'I'll Be Missing You' — tribute to Notorious B.I.G.
Bad Boy issues 'I'll Be Missing You' — Puff Daddy & Faith Evans (featuring 112), built on a sample of the Police's 'Every Breath You Take' — as a tribute to the Notorious B.I.G., killed eleven weeks earlier. The track spends 11 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and becomes the second-best-selling US single of 1997. It is one of the most commercially successful hip-hop tribute records ever released.
Why it matters
"I'll Be Missing You" came out on Bad Boy on May 27, 1997, as a tribute single to Notorious B.I.G., eleven weeks after he was killed. Puff Daddy rapped. Faith Evans (Biggie's widow) sang the chorus. 112 sang the harmonies. The beat is built around an interpolation (later corrected to a properly licensed sample, after the Police's publishers sued) of "Every Breath You Take." The song spent eleven weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, which was at the time the longest #1 run of any rap song ever. It was the second-biggest-selling single of 1997, behind "Candle in the Wind 1997" (the Elton John Princess Diana tribute), which means two of the three biggest singles of 1997 were tributes to people who had been killed in their twenties. "I'll Be Missing You" is one of the most commercially successful tribute records ever made in any genre. It is also one of the most-played wedding-and-funeral songs from the late 1990s onward. You have heard it. You have probably needed it.
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