The Notorious B.I.G. Tried to Convince Jay-Z to Move to Atlanta
Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G. are widely regarded as two of the greatest rappers to come out of New York. The two rap legends rose to prominence in the 1990s from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. But when they were friends back in the day, Biggie tried to convince Hov to pick up and move with him down south to Atlanta.
The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z had a similar life growing up
Both Biggie and Jay grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and even attended the same high school.
When they were young, both Biggie and Jay turned to selling crack on the streets of Bed-Stuy to make money. Once Biggie’s rap career took off in the early 1990s, however, he chose to leave the field behind. Biggie made no secret of his past in his music, as has Jay-Z over the years.
The two rappers met for the first time when recording their collab “Brooklyn’s Finest” from Jay’s acclaimed 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt.
Biggie wanted Jay-Z to move to Atlanta
Despite being two of the hottest rappers in Brooklyn in the 1990s, Biggie was imagining another life for himself and Jay.
In May 2022, Jay-Z joined a Twitter Spaces conversation celebrating the late rapper’s 50th birthday. He revealed that his old friend tried to get him to move to Atlanta; at the time, the ATL wasn’t the hip-hop and entertainment capital that it eventually became (thanks in large part to rappers like OutKast), but Biggie had a feeling it was going to be the next hip-hop destination.
“You know, Big in like ’96, I wanna say, ’96, ’95, was talking about, ‘Yo, let’s go to Atlanta get two big houses next to each other,’ and I’m looking like, ‘Atlanta?’ I’m like, ‘We’re the hottest guys in New York City, like in the world, in the Mecca. Why are we going to Atlanta?’”
“If you think about Atlanta and how it is today and how influential Atlanta is, you just see how much of a visionary this guy was,” Jay conceded. “He was doing Brooklyn Mint clothing line back then, so all the things he was talking about was way ahead of his time.”
Biggie admired Jay-Z
Biggie had a soft spot for Jay-Z — not just as a friend, but as a rapper. According to his Junior M.A.F.I.A. groupmate Lil’ Cease, Biggie thought Jay-Z was a better rapper than he was.
“Big met [Jay-Z] at the Palladium and they bonded just on some G s— because they respected each other as men and they respected each other as artists,” Cease said in a 2020 Instagram Live with Smoke DZA. “Big wasn’t afraid to tell that; Big thought he was doper than him. Big used to say, ‘Yo, that n—- nicer than me.’”
“When Jay-Z said that line on ‘Dead Presidents [II],’ ‘N****s take a freeze off my kneecap / N**** believe that,’ Big was like, ‘Yo, he got me.’”
Biggie stopped writing down his lyrics because of Jay-Z
DJ Clark Kent, an early collaborator of both Jay and Biggie’s, reflected on their friendship in a 2016 interview with VladTV. From the moment they met at the studio to record “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a bond had been formed.
“They met each other. It wasn’t even like they had a conversation; they just started to laugh, clap hands — because there was an insane amount of respect for each other’s craft,” he recalled. “You don’t really have to talk in those moments.”
When Jay-Z rewrote and recorded his verse entirely from memory, Biggie was dumbfounded. After that, he similarly never wrote down any more of his lyrics before recording them.
“Big is like mystified,” Kent remembered. “I was like, ‘I told you: he don’t write no rhymes.’ And from that point, Big stopped writing rhymes. He’s like, ‘I’m not gonna be the guy that’s gonna be here writing when this guy can do that.’ Even though I told [Biggie] a bunch of times, ‘He don’t write his rhymes down,’ he thought it was impossible that he could say rhymes that good without writing them down.”
