Chapter 1: What was the nature of the rivalry between Biggie and Tupac?
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Chapter 2: How did Biggie and Tupac's friendship evolve over time?
Oh, from, uh, hate saber tail. Yeah, of course. But, uh, to be real. And like you said, not, you know, if you were found out to be, um, sort of rapping about something and, and really kind of, uh, fake, uh, in real life, like that, that's no good for your career, um, as a hip hop artist.
So it's sort of, you know, they, uh, I don't know, to me, they're sort of victims of that whole thing in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
Yeah. But at the same time, they definitely bought into it. I mean, they essentially laid the groundwork for that. It's just it's crazy because it's just such a ubiquitous, widespread thing for so long. It's strange to to think that you can trace it back to one group, one duo, essentially.
Yeah, so we're going to tell you a little bit about Tupac and his beginnings, a little bit about Biggie, and then once they met up, kind of what happened from there. But as far as Tupac goes, he was born in 1971, same year as me. He was born in Harlem. His mother was Afeni Shakur, and she was one of the Panther 21. I'm pretty sure we talked about them in the Black Panther episode.
But they were part of the Black Panther Party, the ones who were accused of carrying out a bombing campaign. Um, she did win an acquittal in court defending herself and exposed a lot of stuff about undercover cops and the tactics they use that were very untoward. Uh, but Tupac was born about a month after that trial and, uh, born the same crooks.
But it's not like he changed his name to be a cool hip hop guy later. He was actually renamed by his mom when he was about a year old after indigenous South American revolutionary Tupac Amaru II. So he's essentially was always Tupac. Yeah, he was named after an 18th century Incan, I believe, who led a rebellion against the Spanish. Little known fact. I didn't know that. Did you? I did not.
So I usually think I associate Tupac with New York because pretty much all the movies he was ever in were all set in New York. But he's from San Francisco. I mean, he was born in Harlem, but his family moved to San Francisco or actually Marin County, which is a suburb of San Francisco pretty early on in his life. And at the time, his mom was struggling with a crack addiction.
So Tupac was essentially on his own from a very young age. And as black kids at the time in the 80s in particular did to make money when you were in a situation like that, he sold drugs. And that's how he supported himself for a long time while he was even going through school, too. Yeah. And he was like we'll see Biggie was. He was a really good English student.
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Chapter 3: What events led to the escalation of tensions between the East and West Coast rap scenes?
In 1992 and 1993, he was in the movies Juice and Poetic Justice. Both really great movies. Juice is awesome. Actually, so is Poetic Justice. I love both of those movies. The one I've seen him in, I think I saw Juice. I didn't see Poetic Justice. I saw Above the Rim. He was really good in Above the Rim. I never saw that one. Oh, that's a good one. You should see it.
We need to get together and have a Tupac watch party, I guess. Okay, let's do that. Yeah. But he started getting a little more famous sort of slowly. And this is when kind of the early 90s at the very beginning of his career is when he first started getting into trouble and getting like a real reputation as sort of living that lifestyle.
Yeah, I mean, like, for real, he was involved in a shootout at the Marin County Festival where he lived, where he had just performed, that killed a six-year-old who was playing on a school ground nearby. Yeah. He shot at off-duty police in Atlanta in 1993 when he tried to prevent them from beating up a black motorist.
And those charges were thrown out because it turns out the cops were off-duty, didn't announce themselves as cops, and were super drunk. Right. But, you know, those kind of things, like his legend as like a thug living the thug life, which I think he basically coined, that just formed and melded really quickly right out of the gate. Like this guy was legit as far as his fans were concerned.
Yeah, for sure. So that's Tupac's early days. Biggie Smalls was born. He's a little younger. He was born in 1972 in Brooklyn. His name was Christopher Wallace. He was born to Jamaican immigrant parents. And his mom was a preschool teacher. Um, his dad was a politician in Jamaica, but, uh, ended up, you know, leaving when he was two years old and became a welder in the United States.
Uh, but her, his mom, you know, Valetta really thought a lot about education, obviously as a teacher. So she took on a second job just so she could send him to a very well-regarded high school. Um, uh, and then later went to, uh, George Westinghouse career in tech education, high school, which had quite an alumni base as far as hip hop goes, because DMX, Busta Rhymes, Love Busta.
And Jay-Z all went there. Yeah, I'm guessing I didn't, I wasn't able to find it, but I'm guessing they crossed paths and may have been there at the same time. Yeah, I mean, Donald Glover would have gone to my high school had they not sent him to the School of the Arts. Oh, yeah? And I saw him in New York City a few feet from me when I was there in December.
And let me tell you, dude, I don't know if I've ever seen a more handsome grown man in person with my eyeballs. Really? He's astoundingly good looking. And I wanted to go over and say like, hey, man, we grew up in the same neighborhood, basically. And you're really good looking. You're really handsome.
But he, and I'm such a big fan of his, but from his music to his acting, but he was with his family and like, it's just like, I'm just not going to do that. Instead, you got in your car and shouted, we're Dan Hyrules and like laid rubber peeling out of the parking lot. Yeah, that's right. Sure. Danger Mouse went to my high school, too, though. Oh, yeah? Oh, I forgot about Danger Mouse.
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Chapter 4: What role did Sean Combs play in the Biggie and Tupac rivalry?
And being an entrepreneur and all sorts of other things, he decided to found his own record company, Bad Boy Worldwide Music Group, usually known as Bad Boy Records. And one of the first things he did was sign Biggie Smalls. And they became... Paired up in the media. They hung out. They're friends. They are fairly close.
But like those two were inseparable as far as like the public was concerned, whether that was fully true or not. Yeah. And his when he put out his first single, it was under the name Notorious B.I.G. because of legal issues, I guess, with the movie. Yeah. Biggie Smalls. Was that my take? Yeah. OK, so he was Notorious B.I.G. Officially. Everyone called him Biggie, of course.
He had as a kid in 93 with his high school girlfriend, Jan Jackson, not Janet Jackson. And he hadn't really broken through at this point, even though he was with Sean Combs at the time. But he you know, so he continued to kind of deal drugs. Apparently, Combs was like, you can't do that kind of stuff if you want to get anywhere. But he broke up with his wife.
High school sweetheart who he had his first kid with. And a few months after that, ended up with Faith Evans, who was also on the Bad Boy label. And that is Biggie and his start. So good time for a break? Yeah. We're at 1993. Tupac's already a star and Biggie's starting to come up. All right. We'll be right back. S-Y-L-Y-S-K-S-K-K-K-K-K. I'm John Polk.
For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. Once upon a time, I was on 60 Minutes, Oprah, the front cover of Newsweek. And you might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy to shine a light on what the X Game movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause. I had lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight.
It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult. And as I look, too, at the harm I did from within.
Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
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Chapter 5: How did Tupac's time in prison affect his relationship with Biggie?
Biggie was just starting to come up. He was pretty well known around New York. And Tupac kind of became a mentor to him. They met in 1993, and they hung out with a bunch of other people, played around with a bunch of guns at Tupac's house. And they became close enough that whenever Biggie went out to L.A., he stayed on Tupac's couch. That's right.
He was, like I said, he kind of considered Biggie like one of his lieutenants at the time and definitely was a mentor. Biggie's debut came out. It was called Ready to Die in 1994. And before that, Biggie was like... you know what, I think you should just be my manager and take over for Sean Combs. And Tupac was like, no, man, you need to stick with that guy.
Apparently, Tupac wasn't a big fan of Combs. But, you know, he said that I had a feeling he just didn't want to get into managing him. Well, he said he'll make you a star, and I think he did know that Tupac wasn't a manager or a label owner.
He was a performer, and Sean Combs liked to think of himself as a performer, but really he was an executive, so it probably was the smarter move to stay with him, at least at first, right?
Yeah.
The problem was is Sean Combs, again, remember, inextricably linked BFF ā with Biggie as far as the public's concerned, was actually jealous of Biggie and Tupac's friendship. He wanted to be friends with Tupac. He was jealous that Biggie got to be friends with Tupac. The reason Tupac didn't care about being friends with Sean Combs is that he thought Sean Combs was basically a poser.
He was a record executive playing like he was a hardcore rapper. And he didn't have much respect for him. And I think that really kind of came through to Sean Combs after a little while. He started not liking Tupac. Yeah, that's right. So the beef is sort of, the beef seed is planted, as they are, you know, that old saying. Where's the beef seed? It's been planted.
Ready to Die, like I mentioned, was Biggie's debut in 94. It was a big hit. It went double platinum about a year later. which means a lot of records were sold. And this was when the West Coast was sort of like all the big hip hop stars were mainly out of the West Coast. So he was kind of the biggest thing coming out of New York right off the bat. And it's a great record.
He was, you know, he rapped a lot about, you know, sort of like the lifestyle and the gangsta stuff that he was doing. But also there was a lot of vulnerability on that first record, too. Yeah, yeah. And Tupac wasn't shy about rapping about mental health and stuff like that. And up to this point, you did not talk about that kind of stuff.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the Source Awards in the East Coast-West Coast feud?
Yeah. Yeah. So things are going along. Biggie and Tupac are friends. One's in New York. One's on the West Coast. It turned out Biggie was pretty right in warning Tupac against Haitian Jack because shortly after that, Tupac met a girl named Ayanna Jackson. She was 19 at the time while he was in New York filming, hanging out with Haitian Jack.
And she alleged that Tupac, Haitian Jack, the road manager for Tupac, Charles Manman Fuller, and another man, I couldn't find who he was, gang raped her. And she called the police afterward. The police showed up. They found guns in the room. And now Tupac is in big, big trouble again, right? So two threads begin here.
One is Tupac is now charged with sexual abuse, sodomy, and possession of guns, illegal guns. That starts, that thread starts. It will pick up again later. But another thread starts, which is a dispute, a beef now with Haitian Jack because he thought that Haitian Jack had dropped the dime on Tupac to get out of the trouble for this gang rape charge. Yeah.
So Haitian Jack had his case separated from Man Man Fuller and Tupac. He pleaded down to a lesser charge. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and avoided jail time. Tupac always said he was innocent and that he was set up and sold out by Haitian Jack. But that, you know, we need to point out that completely contradicts the story of the victim from Ayanna Jackson. So, yeah.
But, you know, the whole point of this is there's like you said, there's now this official beef that kind of, again, planted the seed of what would happen to he and eventually Biggie moving forward. Yeah. And the thing that really kind of blew this whole thing up is Tupac said as much. He said Haitian Jack cooperated with the police.
This major actual gangster in New York cooperated with the police in an interview with the New York Daily News. So the New York Daily News prints Tupac saying that. And that did not make Haitian Jack very happy. Those two separated. immediately. They didn't talk anymore. They weren't friends anymore. They didn't hang out.
And now Tupac had essentially an enemy in Haitian Jack, which is, from what I can tell, not what you wanted. No, not at all. So the case is moving forward at this point. Tupac is financially strapped because while he is making money, he's spending it faster than he's making it. He's also helping out friends and family with their finances.
So there was an invitation from a guy named Jimmy Henchman Roseman. He knew Sean Combs. He knew Haitian Jack. And he said, hey, Tupac, why don't you do a guest spot for this rapper Little Sean? He's in Biggie Circle. He's a guy with Sean Combs as well. We'll pay seven grand. He needed the money. So he did it. He shows up at Times Square at Quad Recording Studios on November 1st.
30th along with three of his guys and before getting on the elevator uh to go up and record they were met by these other three guys who draw guns tell him to get down on the ground uh tupac draws his gun and he ends up being shot he ends up being robbed he ends up being beaten pretty badly and combs and biggie and uh henchman jimmy henchman roseman were up in the studio at the time um
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Chapter 7: What were the circumstances surrounding Tupac's murder?
Yeah, called Me Against the World. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So while Tupac was in jail, I don't remember how long he was in for. 18 months. 18 months, okay. While he was in jail, Biggie releases a track called Who Shot Ya?, And Tupac interprets that as it was completely directed to him. It was essentially Biggie Smalls gloating about having set up Tupac and now Tupac was in jail and he'd been shot.
And that seems to not be the case at all. Biggie Smalls apparently wrote that song before the Quad City shooting. And again, just from all evidence, it seems like Biggie had no problem with Tupac. This is all in Tupac's head. Like this whole East Coast, West Coast beef seems to have come from Tupac being paranoid, essentially. And I looked up why he might've been paranoid.
And apparently there's pretty widespread acknowledgement or belief that he was suffering from substantial mental health issues while he was alive. And that that had a huge impact on the way that he interacted with people, the level of trust he would afford even the closest people.
Like, I think it was very easy to fall out of his favor because you might do or say something that he suddenly found suspicious. And now all of a sudden, like you were his enemy, like you would do something like set him up or rob him or, pay for him to be killed or something. Yeah. I wondered about that. I'm glad you looked into that. Thank you. I am too. You're welcome.
Uh, maybe we should take another break. Yeah. All right. We'll take another break and we'll, uh, we'll get back to it right after this. I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
Once upon a time, I was on 60 Minutes, Oprah, the front cover of Newsweek. And you might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy to shine a light on what the X Game movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause. I had lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight.
It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult. And as I look, too, at the harm I did from within.
Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
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Chapter 8: How did Biggie's death impact the hip-hop community?
It's a legit music label as far as like the stuff that the artists on the label are rapping about.
Yeah.
The CEO of the record label is a blood, not a form of blood, a blood. Yeah. So we talked about how the quad studio shooting like really kind of started the beef. The thing that made that beef really genuinely public came at the award show for Source magazine, their annual awards. This time, this one was in 1995. Right.
where Suge Knight, who'd been visiting Tupac in jail and apparently had bought into Tupac's theory that Sean Combs and Biggie Smalls had set him up to be shot and robbed. Suge Knight was accepting an award. And during his speech, he invited any any rapper who didn't want to worry about the executive producer trying to be in all the videos, which was a direct shot.
at Sean Combs, he said, come on over to Death Row Records. And, I mean, if you go back and look at, like, Biggie Smalls' videos and, like, basically any rapper on this label at the time, Sean Combs is probably going to pop up making a cameo, if not dance on it, usually with his shirt wide open. He really was not... He was not what Death Row Records was doing.
And so Suge Knight made a pretty good point. If you were really actually looking for legit stuff, come over here. But saying it publicly and doing it by taking a shot at Sean Combs at the Source Awards while you're accepting an award, it was a big deal. That really kind of made that beef public, and it turned into East Coast versus West Coast essentially immediately. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I remember at the time thinking, cause, uh, I remember just seeing, and it wasn't just rappers, like they had like some R&B acts. And I feel like Combs was always in those videos, just like, like you said, either dancing or just like, yeah, yeah, in the background.
And I remember thinking about the time, at the time, and this wasn't like, my hip hop was all like earlier stuff and Tribe Called Quest and that kind of thing. And, you know, Dr. Dre and Snoop, I was into that at first, but this generally wasn't my thing. But I remember thinking like, this guy's like, he sucks. Like he's not, he's not a talented artist. No.
Uh, cause he wasn't, I guess, you know, he was a, like you said, an executive and a producer. And, uh, I was, I remember thinking that like, why is he always throwing himself in there in front of the camera? Like he sucks. Yeah, and he was dorky even compared to who were essentially mainstream rap artists like Tupac and Biggie Smalls. Oh, yeah. No shade on them.
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