How The Notorious B.I.G. Processed His Mom’s Cancer Diagnosis Through His Music

The Notorious B.I.G. and his mother Voletta Wallace lived together in a small apartment in Brooklyn and relied on each other for emotional support. Biggie’s father left before he was born, and Voletta — an immigrant from Jamaica — raised her son and tried to steer him on the right path. Biggie always had a special place in his heart for his mom, so when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the up-and-coming rapper didn’t know what to do.

The Notorious B.I.G.’s relationship with his mom

As a child, Christopher Wallace was interested in music and loved spending his summers in Jamaica with his mother. As he got older, however, he witnessed firsthand in his neighborhood how lucrative selling drugs could be at the height of the crack epidemic. He started selling drugs on the streets of Brooklyn when he was 12 years old. One time, she found crack in his bedroom, resulting in an explosive argument.

The two only had each other to rely on, however, and their love for each other was unbreakable. Even after he became The Notorious B.I.G., she still treasured him as her son Christopher. “Basically, she don’t five a f*** about none of that s***,” Biggie said in footage from the 2021 documentary Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell. “I ain’t ‘Biggie.’ I’m her son, you know what I’m saying? That’s how she looks at it.”

He vented about his mom’s cancer diagnosis in his music

In 1993, as Biggie’s rap career was on the verge of blowing up, doctors found a malignant tumor in his mother’s breast. When she told him her diagnosis, he couldn’t bear to hear or think about what could happen to his mom.

He largely kept his grieving to himself, with many of his close friends not even knowing what he was dealing with. He instead put his sadness and anger into his music, specifically on the song “Things Done Changed” from his 1994 debut album Ready to Die. In the song, he raps, “S***, my mom’s got cancer in her breast / Don’t ask me why I’m mothaf***in’ stressed.” When his friends heard early recordings of the song, they were taken aback by the news.

“I’ma keep it a hundred with you. Nobody knew. He didn’t tell nobody that,” his friend and future Junior M.A.F.I.A. groupmate Chico Del Vec said, as reported in Justin Tinsley’s 2022 book It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him. “I didn’t know until I heard the song. Being with him all the time, certain things he kept to himself. It was more like a ‘I ain’t gonna tell nobody that’ because it might really break him down feeling like, ‘Yo, my moms gon’ die.’”

“When he started recording and he’d say certain things, I was like, ‘Yo, is that true?’ He’d be like, ‘Yeah, Chic.’ I’d be like ‘Wow. I ain’t know that.’ But we brushed it off like that. Let’s drink, let’s smoke,” Del Vec continued. “When he put that in the music, that’s how I knew. Everything he said was real because he couldn’t talk about nothing phony. He had a lot on his mind at that point. Through a mix of trying to do music and hustling and people trying to get at you for this and that, you know, it gets to a point where he was really ready to die. I was like, ‘Duke, are you crazy?!’”

His mother has been an active part of his legacy

Voletta Wallace lost her only son on March 9, 1997 at 24 years old, leaving a mother grieving along with millions of people around the world.

In the years since then, Voletta has been actively involved in the preservation of Biggie’s legacy, often appearing at events celebrating his contributions to music and even writing her own memoir in 2005.