The Notorious B.I.G. - легенда рэпа Бигги Смолз

THE PIVOTAL MIX TAPE

But it wasn't all drugs and drinking. Chico and Wallace liked to listen to music on Wallace's boom box, buying cheap mix tapes sold on the cor¬ner of their neighborhood. Although Wallace loved LL Cool J and some of the other prominent rappers of the time, he began to dig a new style, one that spoke to the way he lived his life, a style called gangsta rap.
Emerging out of California in the late 1980s, the first strains of gang-sta rap were heard in N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, an album—and style—that took immediate hold of the rap audience's attention. Marked by violent lyrics over soul and funk beats, gangsta rap tends to lyrically focus on women, drugs, and gang violence, often with a particular group pledging allegiance to a particular gang, be it the Crips or the Bloods.

Wallace immediately took to this new style, later claiming that it inspired him to continue rapping on his own. Sometimes he and some friends, including Damien "D-Roc" Butler, would hang out with the Old Gold Brothers and DJ 50 Grand, a local turntablist. They would hole up in Wallace's bedroom, listening to mix tapes and albums and smoking co¬pious amounts of marijuana. One day they went over to 50 Grand's house and made their way down to his basement, where Wallace saw his two turntables, a mixer, a microphone, and a huge stack of records.

Wallace told 50 Grand that he had musical skills and that he knew his way around a microphone. According to an interview Wallace later gave a Vibe reporter, 50 Grand then stepped behind the turntables, grabbed two copies of Ultimate Breaks and Beats, Volume 24, and put both records on the turntables. He chose the fourth track, the Emotions' "Blind Alley," a track that had previously served as background for a Big Daddy Kane song.
Wallace grabbed the microphone and set to rhyming, his style slow but methodical, his voice low but hypnotizing. Everyone was transfixed, and when he ended along with the track, 50 said, "Let's make a tape."