Juicy Lyrics

Biggie isn't exaggerating: he actually did work as a drug dealer right on up to the launch of his rap career.

Christopher Wallace was a sharp kid who attended a private Catholic middle school (and later dropped out of a downtown Brooklyn high school also attended by Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z). But from age 12, Biggie made his money as a drug dealer. He began trafficking drugs from New York to Virginia and Maryland, and dropped out of high school at 17. 

After several minor arrests, in his late teens, he was arrested for selling crack and served ten months in prison in North Carolina. He had his first child, T'Yanna, shortly after his release.

Rumor has it that Sean (Puffy) Combs had to push Biggie to get him to stop selling drugs after Biggie accepted a record deal for Ready to Die. Biggie legendarily left a North Carolina drug house a day before it was raided by police and returned to New York at Combs' urging, a narrow miss that could have changed his entire career.

Word Up! was one of the first popular magazines to focus on hip-hop culture.

Biggie spent his childhood days admiring the likes of Marley Marl, and other late 1980s and early 1990s rap stars. 

Just as Biggie came of age, hip-hop hit the mainstream, and the possibility of becoming a big-time star became a little more real for dreaming teens like Biggie.

Wait, what? This was 1994—seven years before the World Trade Center collapsed in the infamous September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Biggie was living in a pre-9/11 world, but another fact sometimes gets lost in history: The World Trade Center was the target of a bombing in 1993. 

Saddam Hussein, then struggling under harsh U.S. sanctions on Iraq, was a suspected supporter of the bombings. But alas, it was later discovered that the bombers were independent actors, associates of the Al-Qaeda network that came back to haunt those very same buildings in 2001.

But this wasn't the last time that Saddam Hussein was associated with attacks on the World Trade Center. 

Biggie's Mom, Voletta Wallace, insists that the family may not have been rich, but they weren't dirt poor the way Biggie describes them.

Biggie's father left when he was young, and Voletta, an immigrant from Jamaica, raised Biggie alone. She worked as a schoolteacher and was able to send Biggie to a private (Catholic) middle school. 

Although she has never commented on the question of sardines for dinner, she says they always had food on the table and insists that any talk about a one-room shack is exaggeration on Biggie's part. (Source)

Robin Leach was an icon of the late 1980s and '90s for his television show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

This was back before virtually all TV was focused on lifestyles of the rich and famous (or, alternately, on common thieves).

Super Nintendo was to 1990 what the Wii was to 2006.

Sega Genesis was a similarly coveted 1990 release. One scholar also called the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega "one of the fiercest console wars in video game history" (source, 431)—a pleasantly ridiculous distinction, if you ask us.

Biggie's point? Not related to fierce console wars. He just wants us to know that, although he wasn't about to sell crack on the streets in order to buy a Sega Genesis, success as a rapper is granting him access to material goods he never dreamed of.

Christopher Wallace loved his mom.

Biggie—so called because he was called "Big" as a kid—lived with his mother in Fort Green, Brooklyn until he turned 20 (although plenty of reports place them in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jay-Z's home neighborhood, this is a slight inaccuracy often played up by Biggie). 

One of the first things he did after his rap career took off was to buy his mom a new place in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Apparently he also bought her an Acura and some nice furs.