Biggie was known for being all about his friends and family, and it’s now come to light that he once helped Ma$e out of a financial bind with a ghostwriting gig.
Lance “Un” Rivera recently sat down with VladTV where he reflected on Biggie paying the Harlem native to pen Lil Cease‘s “Crush On You,” which helped ease the financial struggles he was allegedly facing due to an unfavourable deal he had with Diddy at Bad Bad Boy Records.
“Puff signed Ma$e so can ya imagine what kind of contract Ma$e got? Because B.I.G. just came off that same contract,” Un told Vlad. “The LOX all of them came off the same contracts. So B.I.G. rapping with Ma$e on the 112 [‘Only You’] remix, Ma$e is broke.
“So B.I.G. says, ‘Un, give Ma$e a check and he’s gonna write for Cease.’ Ma$e comes back with a record called ‘Crush On You’ for Lil Cease’s album…I think we paid him $7,500 a record and he made six records. He comes back with ‘Crush On You’ and there’s three verses with Lil Cease on there.”
He continued: “The original album that we shipped Kim wasn’t even on ‘Crush On You.’ It was all Cease for three verses and B.I.G. is doing the chorus. A million albums without Kim and then Kim rapped on the record. She wrote her own verses and B.I.G. said, ‘Come up with an idea for the video.'”
Rivera was tasked with directing the music video featuring Lil Kim which arrived in February 1997 — just mere weeks prior to Biggie’s murder.
The Wiz-inspired clip saw a cameo from Sheek Louch and helped push “Crush On You” to No. 4 on the Billboard R&B/Hip Hop Airplay Chart.
In a testament to Biggie’s giving nature, The D.O.C. recently recalled how humble the Brooklyn rap deity was when he met him in the ’90s.
“I got mad at Biggie Smalls ’cause I could hear where I was gonna go,” The D.O.C. began. “When he first came [out], I could hear where I wanted to go, and couldn’t do it. So it made me be angry with him — before I met him.”
He continued: “But when I met him, he was such a genuine dude. He asked me to take a picture with him, and he was so fuckin’ humble. And I was like, how can you hate a dude like that? Ever since then, he’s been my No. 1, really. We were in Chicago at something. It was Saafir, and Craig Mack, and Smalls, and myself. And he was just a cool dude, man.”
Ma$e wrote B.I.G.’s verse on Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems. I thought people been knew this. He put Cam’Ron on with the ghostwriting for Junior Mafia too.
Nobody wrote shit for big, where the fuck you get your information from?
FOH with that fugazi accusation. Mase has mentioned that it was his song originally, which is absolutely believable, but BIG woulda NEVER had anyone else write verses for him.
It’s on the copyright dummy. So yeah, he did. B.I.G. was giving him a look to help him because like has been said, dude was broke.
Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems was not his song. He asked him to write it to help him out. It’s not an accusation. It’s on the copyright of the song. It’s not a secret. Sorry you’re too dumb to know this for 25 years. Shit doesn’te ven sound like a B.I.G. verse when you listen to it, and I heard it the other day, and I was still like how did anybody think Biggie wrote this.
You can def hear mase in that crush on you song
Wrong Camron wrote it
Wrong Camron wrote it
Wrong Camron wrote it
Yep, Cam’Ron has said that Ma$e gave him half of the money to write it because he was even more broke than Ma$e. He’s really the pen behind it.