Biggie was more than a little upset upon hearing 2Pac‘s “Hit ‘Em Up” for the first time – apparently being brought to tears, according to Lance ‘Un’ Rivera.
In a new interview with Vlad TV published on Monday (May 8), the record executive opened up about the climate that led to the beef between the two late rappers, which he chocks up to being competition.
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“When 2Pac finally did get out of jail and whatever happened with Suge and Interscope – he came home, and at that moment in time, Big was the biggest rapper on the planet,” Un began. “He was huge. I’m talking about he was on fire. He had sold two million albums probably at that time. The Mafia was pushing a million.
“So we had this hit record called ‘Get Money’ and we had a remix to it and all of a sudden, ‘Pac comes home and we’re at a video shoot and somebody plays ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ for us and we all looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck just happened?'”
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He continued: “Because like I said, that record was hot. It was big. ‘Cause me personally like I said, I’m ready to go to war. I wanted to shoot a video the next day, make a song the next day and make one of those videos targeting Suge and Death Row. And Big was like, ‘Nah we’re not gonna do anything. We’re not gonna even respond.'”
Vlad then referenced a prior interview Un did with DJ Self in 2017 where he said that Big “cried like a baby” when he first heard the diss (that opens with ‘Pac saying he’d slept with Big’s then-wife Faith Evans), and Un confirmed that did indeed happen.
“I was in the room when he heard Faith and 2Pac,” he said in the 2017 interview. “He cried like a baby!”
In his interview with Vlad, Lance added why he thought it happened. “The real reason [‘Pac dropped that] was the fact that Biggie was huge. He was huge and he needed… Like I said, Nas, Biggie and ‘Pac – those were the top. ‘Pac went to jail, he did whatever he did so now Biggie has staked claim to the King of Hip Hop. I’m the target now, I’m the king. So now everybody else is like, ‘Okay, I got to get back.'”
“That’s what makes 50 [Cent] so relevant to what he was doing when he took ‘Pac’s formula and said, ‘Oh I’m gonna make a hit record and disrespect you on the record.’ That’s what rap is. Rap has always been artists battling for the number one spot. It’s all part of the game – who’s number one?”
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, ‘Pac’s infamous diss recently got a “remix” from Biggie. Though the snippet is only about a minute long, the music featuring Biggie’s voice is quite convincing — even if him taking shots at himself is less so.
The Reddit group Yedits — a community that dedicates itself to the “mixing and editing of a wide variety of artists’ music” — first posted the mashup last month, but it’s recently picked up steam now that it’s making the social media rounds.
Check out the new track here.
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Meanwhile, 2Pac’s new Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni & Tupac Shakur docu-series has received a perfect 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and comes after the FX series already shattered TV records.
The new perfect score was unveiled on Friday (May 5), with critics such as TIME, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter praising the sensitive approach to 2Pac’s legacy taken by the director Allen Hughes.
