"Mo Money Mo Problems" is released

Why it matters

The chorus on "Mo Money Mo Problems" is the part you cannot get out of your head. Mase, who at that point had been signed to Bad Boy for less than a year, sings it as a kind of nonchalant aphorism over the Diana Ross loop. The line itself ("the more money we come across, the more problems we see") is one of those rap koans that has detached from the song and now appears in business books, sports articles, and SNL sketches alike. The writing on the verses is the part less discussed. Biggie's verse, the first one, is technically immaculate. He raps in a more relaxed and confident cadence than he had on Ready to Die three years earlier, with the casual fluency of a writer who has nothing to prove. Puff Daddy's verse is fine. Mase's verse is the one that made Mase, briefly, one of the most marketable rappers of late-1997. "Mo Money Mo Problems" was Bad Boy at its commercial absolute peak. The label has spent the last twenty-seven years trying, occasionally, to recapture this exact balance of pop sample, hook, and verse. You can hear why nobody quite has.