yo you know where you at hustl eor die tryin

If he ever forgot that - if he ever got too worried about his open cases for drug and gun charges - he could look at his right arm and read Psalm 27. He wasn’t going to become a gospel rapper, but he had come to realize that his success was nothing without a spiritual grounding. But as he sat in rehab, alone with nothing but his thoughts on many occasions, Wallace had found God. Wallace had heard the chants of “Westside!” and “Death Row!” from cars as they passed by. He heard him and he understood why the NBA star said what he said. “But come to my party.” (The party he was referring to was an after-party for the Soul Train Music Awards held a few days later at the Petersen Automotive Museum.) O’Neal knew the temperature in the streets of LA had been intense the last several months as Death Row Records’ very public downfall played out. “Yo, just be careful,” the still-new Los Angeles Laker warned. O’Neal was ecstatic to see his friend but also weary. Their relationship dated to Wallace name-dropping O’Neal on 1994’s “ Gimme The Loot,” and the two recorded “ Still Can’t Stop The Reign” together in 1996. As he was preparing to get tatted, his friend and NBA star Shaquille O’Neal was finishing up his own ink. That tattoo revealed much of where Wallace’s mind had been and where he hoped he was going as he approached his 25th birthday. enters the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a look back at ‘Ready to Die’ Read now If he had his way, he’d be a Los Angeles resident very soon. Wallace was even attempting to buy a house out west. And though he was still battling the conflicting emotions of Shakur’s impact on his marriage and career, he loved hearing Shakur on the radio. He first met Shakur at the Sheraton Hotel in Studio City just four years earlier, and he had gotten his first tattoo in the city a few days before his demise. And second, Bad Boy’s presence in LA so soon after Shakur’s slaying and Suge Knight’s newly minted nine-year prison sentence could be misconstrued as taunting.īut Wallace saw his time in the City of Angels as a diplomatic trip. At the time, the talk in the industry about Wallace centered on two realities: first, that his sophomore double album, Life After Death, figured to be the year’s biggest hit. Despite it all, Wallace was hoping for a fresh start.Įven as headlines spoke of Bad Boy versus Death Row and the “East Coast-West Coast war,” Wallace had been in Los Angeles for the better part of 1997. Wallace’s chaotic love life with his wife, singer Faith Evans, his most talented understudy Lil’ Kim, and girlfriend and rapper Charli Baltimore was tabloid fodder - and it was largely Wallace’s own doing. He had to be cut out of the vehicle with the jaws of life, spent the next three months rehabbing, and needed to walk with a cane. The same week Shakur was killed, Wallace had been in a near-fatal car accident. He hated the whispers that he may have been involved in Pac’s death. Wallace hated how their friendship had dissolved. The slaying of his onetime friend-turned-rival Tupac Shakur six months earlier was still a fresh wound in rap’s psyche. And while fame in hip-hop came with its perks - the money, the notoriety, the women who loved Big Poppa and couldn’t wait to show him - it was still hell in some ways, just in different packaging.īut on that fateful morning in March, Wallace’s life felt like it was at a crossroads. The rival crews, the out-of-town trips he’d make to North Carolina to resupply, getting jammed up by police, the shootouts with adversaries - they aged Wallace and a generation of young Black men with him. When Wallace was hustling in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, five years earlier, getting a record deal had seemed like heaven compared with the daily hell of dealing crack. Rather, he was genuinely excited for the future. or Biggie Smalls - had no clue that when he awoke in his Westwood hotel suite that Saturday morning it would be the final sunrise of his life. On March 8, 1997, Christopher George Latore Wallace - or as he was more popularly known, The Notorious B.I.G.

Yo you know where you at hustl eor die tryin