There’s Some Disagreement About if The Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Long Kiss Goodnight’ Is About Tupac
The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were two legendary rappers who shared a close friendship for years. But their relationship soured in the mid-1990s before Tupac’s death in September 1996. Six months later, The Notorious B.I.G. released “Long Kiss Goodnight,” viewed by some to be directly about his onetime friend.
Biggie’s ‘Long Kiss Goodnight’ was viewed by some as his way of bragging about Tupac’s death
Members of Biggie’s crew looked back on the creation of “Long Kiss Goodnight” in a 2003 interview with XXL magazine.
“That was a one-nighter,” Biggie’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. groupmate Lil’ Cease said at the time. “That was about ’Pac. He had some s*** at the beginning of that though, nobody heard it, on the reel. We had to change it. It was a little too much. I can’t remember what Big said about him, but it was terrible. It couldn’t make it. He didn’t want to do it. He had some fire. But he didn’t want to make it too much. He just wanted to address it and to let n**** know, ‘I know what’s going on, and I could get wreck if I want to.’ Like, ‘If I really wanted to get on ya n****s, I could.'”
Diddy, meanwhile, didn’t believe that Biggie actually wrote the song about Tupac. “Naaah. It was just some MC lyrics,” he said. “I know people wanna have their imagination, but it was just lyrics. You’re hearing it from the horse’s mouth. I would tell the truth. If Biggie was going to do a song about 2Pac, he would have just come out with it and said his name. Their gloves were basically off. 2Pac had did ‘Hit ’Em Up.'”
Cease, for his part, changed his tune years later. “Those types of songs wasn’t about ‘Pac,” he said in a 2022 interview on The Art of Dialogue. “Big will tap dance on things, but if he never said his name, it’s not a diss record. ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ was a diss record. He said my name, he said Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s name, he said Faith [Evans’] name, he said Biggie’s name, he said Puffy’s name. That was a diss song.”
RZA produced ‘Long Kiss Goodnight’
RZA, who first rose to prominence as a part of the Wu-Tang Clan, produced “Long Kiss Goodnight,” and gave his own thoughts on Biggie’s approach to the song.
“Biggie was always pretty cool with me. He liked the Wu-Tang sound. He requested me to be on the album,” he said. “We was always cool with each other.”
Biggie’s part came about after he was in a near-fatal car crash that left him using a cane to get around. “Biggie wrote the verse after his accident,” RZA said. “I went in a couple of weeks after he did the verse. [Diddy and others] wanted to mix it themselves, but they didn’t even know where to put things at. I had so many sounds in there. They didn’t know what the f*** I was thinking about.”
Biggie died 2 weeks before ‘Long Kiss Goodnight’s release
Sadly, Biggie wouldn’t live to see “Long Kiss Goodnight”‘s release. On March 9, 1997, the rapper was gunned down in Los Angeles at just 24 years old.
His second album Life After Death hit store shelves two weeks later. The album remains one of the most revered hip-hop albums of all time, spawning No. 1 singles “Hypnotize” and “Mo Money Mo Problems” and eventually earning diamond certification.
