With Saturday [March 25] marking the 20th anniversary of the 1997 release of Notorious B.I.G's posthumous Life After Death album, memories of the late rap great naturally came to surface for those who lived through it's recording with him. The man most notably involved throughout the process, P. Diddy, opened up for an exclusive with his REVOLT TV platform and shared what it was like leading up to the project.
B.I.G. and the Bad Boy family had been celebrating success, as arguably hip hop's most elite entity, following a series of cross-genre hip hop and r&b hits and remixes. The Brooklyn rapper's niche was already carved in the game courtesy of his Ready To Die debut and the Junior M.A.F.I.A clique he kept busy featuring alongside were bubbling with the release of their Conspiracy LP. B.I.G. was next up, and with the expectations sky high for him to follow up on a sensational entrance into the game, the pressure apparently weighed heavy, impacting his creative process according to Diddy.
“A lot of people don’t know that Big stopped working for a while,” the Bad Boy CEO recalled. “He had a writer’s block and just an idea block. It lasted like 6, 7 months. We kinda kept it quiet. During that time he started getting in trouble, got into a car accident. A whole bunch of stuff was not going in the right direction. I got with him and really started explaining to him, ‘You know we could blow it?’ He started kinda really believing in the hype and wasn’t really focused on the second album.”
It was incumbent upon the label boss to get his franchise artist's gears going, which he says he did by simply helping him diversify his workload, which was pretty much the hallmark direction the label that once gloated about having "invented the remix" set its artists. “I started doing Mary [J. Blige’s] remix album, the Lox and Mase was just going and starting to freestyle. I think he had to start hearing stuff," said Diddy.
Source: instagram.com
