He raps warmly about his love for Los Angeles-the city he was murdered in, on March 9, 1997, case still unsolved. He quips about looking up to Snoop Dogg and winked at the camera through his radio singles. The great irony is that, personal animus between Big and Pac aside, Life After Death-as it was ultimately titled-pokes fun at rap’s East-West divide, and at the genre’s posturing more broadly. (In the same article, Puff strenuously denies that the monologue was directed at anyone in particular, but doesn’t offer an alternate explanation for why it was cut.) On “I Love the Dough,” Jay Z says “I’m in the fifteen-hundred seats, watching Tyson.” In 2003, Lil Cease told XXL that the album’s penultimate song, the RZA-produced “Long Kiss Goodnight,” originally opened with words about Tupac that were “terrible,” and which never saw the light of day. He wouldn’t live to add the finishing touches, but there were certainly some tweaks Big made between Pac’s death and his own. It was slated for a Halloween release, but was pushed back due to a litany of issues: sample clearances, marketing rollouts, and so on. He was nearing completion on a sophomore album, tentatively called Life After Death… Til Death Do Us Part. Big absconded to Trinidad to write and record, supported by Bad Boy’s production team, the Hitmen, and by the cane he used after shattering his left leg in a car crash (“ I used to be as strong as Ripple be/’til Lil Cease crippled me”). Just a few years earlier, his sessions for Ready to Die had been interrupted by trips to Raleigh, where he ran a modest but profitable drug trade now he was used to yachts. Six days later, he dies in the hospital.īy the fall of 1996, the Notorious B.I.G. On their way through the lobby, the pair get in a fight of their own, with a Crip named Orlando Anderson shortly after, at 11:15 p.m., a white Cadillac pulls up beside Suge’s black BMW and opens fire, hitting Pac four times. Two of the ticket holders that night: Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur. (A former Marine, Steele was 16-4 as a professional in his own right he supports a disoriented Seldon on his shoulder.) The fans, who have paid hundreds of dollars to the MGM Grand Las Vegas for tickets, begin to taunt Seldon, chanting about how the fix is in. The referee, Richard Steele, steps in and hands Tyson the victory. Seventy-two seconds in, Tyson-already the title holder in the World Boxing Council-has knocked down Seldon with a left hook Seldon gets up, but is knocked down almost immediately by another left. He stands straight up, backing Seldon into corners, sometimes without throwing punches of his own. If you watch that fight today, you see that Tyson doesn’t crouch, doesn’t bob, doesn’t weave. On September 7, 1996, after exactly 109 seconds, Mike Tyson is declared the World Boxing Association’s heavyweight champion, stripping the belt from Bruce Seldon by technical knockout.
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