Things Done Changed

B.I.G. Txt

I didn't know he was gonna be this large," says Mark "Gucci Don" Pitts, the Notorious B.I.G.'s manager, driving the black Lexus that doubles as his office. Pitts, 25, is a former employee of Sean "Puffy" Combs's Bad Boy Entertainment who left to represent Biggie independently in 1993. "Damn," he says, thinking back on the past 24 months, "I can't believe we blew up that quick."

And he's not the only one who's surprised. "That star shit ain't really hit me until a couple of months ago," says 22-year-old Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. Who could have predicted that the Brooklyn native would throw New York hip hop back into the spotlight? He's the East Coast messiah; even KRS-One (he of the legendary skills and equally legendary ego) says it's true. Biggie's album, Ready to Die, is nearly a year old and still up there on the charts.
Biggie 1

His first single, "Juicy," went gold. "Big Poppa" went platinum. And the souped-up "One More Chance/The What (Remix)" had been sitting atop the R&B charts for six weeks at press time. Michael Jackson even asked him to rhyme on HIStory. No doubt, B.I.G. is more than large.

Christopher Wallace was born the only child of a Jamaican single mom. The two have always lived in the same flat in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area until this year, when Big moved into a duplex with his wife, singer Faith Evans, and her daughter. Before his rap career, Big didn't give a fuck about anything-just look at what he named his album. "It was a lot of hard work, getting him serious about business," says Pitts. Big remembers how Pitts helped him through the transition: "Mark used to come to my crib, and I'd be, like, `Fuck you, I ain't doing shit.' But he'd take a hot rag, wipe my face, and help me up."

Biggie's financial situation didn't make things any easier. "When I stopped hustling and started making songs, it was the worst," he says. "My advance from Bad Boy was just petty money, like 12, 20 G's"-nothing in comparison with the "money money" that he was used to back when he was selling drugs