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

The first time I ever heard the name Biggie Smalls, it was on one of those old NBA "movies" they used to put out back in the early 90's that was equal parts highlight package and music video. The song, like the movie itself, was called Jam Session, and featured Biggie along with Heavy D and Troo Kula, one of the emcees that rolled with Bad Boy in its early days but never actually got a record deal with the label.

A year later Ready to Die came out, and Big had changed his name to The Notorious B.I.G. It seemed like a poor marketing decision, as the name certainly didn't roll off the tongue quite the same way that "Biggie Smalls" did. There were rumors that Big had been forced to change his name due to a lawsuit from some white kid out in California, but that seemed rather unbelievable and the Internet hadn't quite evolved to where it's at today so it was impossible to track down any proof of it anyway. I hadn't given the name change much more thought until very recently, when I began preparing for an interview with Majesty, the brother of Tupac's friend and former Live Squad member Stretch. It turned out that there was indeed some truth to the rumors behind Big's name change, but the legacy of the Biggie Smalls name was even more complicated than that.

During the early 90's, there were at least four people using some variation of the name Biggie Smalls and, not altogether coincidentally, they all were affiliated in some way with Tupac and his Thug Life movement. Everyone is of course familiar with Christopher Wallace and the fact that Pac served as something of a mentor and friend to him up until the night that Tupac was shot at Quad Studios, but details on the other men carrying the mantle of Biggie Smalls have been hard to come by.