Seeing as how today is the anniversary of the untimely demise of arguably one of the greatest emcees I think its only right.

During my teenage years I lived only a few blocks from where Notorious BIG lived and hung out. A few blocks from Fulton Street in Bedstuy. The corner and blocks that you see in the Juicy video are literally a few blocks from where I lived. So yeah we were excited when that video came out. I also lived across the street from Buckshot at one point but I’ll save that for another time.

In any case one summer day after Ready To Die really just started to pick up steam in the streets we were hanging out on the block sitting on my steps cracking jokes. So a van pulled up with camera men and BIG rolled up in a truck. There was this illmatic vintage grafitti mural from the 80’s on my corner back then that said “Happy Birthday Best” (no one ever tagged over it) some will know where I am talking about strictly off that because there was also one of the biggest weed spots in Brooklyn around the other corner of this very same block. Even your favorite rappers from New Jersey made appearances to cop some there so yeah it was one of the buddah spots in Brooklyn back then. That is until on my way home from school one day there was a shooting in front of said weed spot and I saw a man murdered. But again that’s a tale for another day.

This particular day BIG was shooting an interview on my corner and everyone on my block was hyped. He shot the interview in front of the mural and after that he stayed around and took photos signed autographs and all that. He seemed like a really cool dude. He was funny and much more approachable than you may think based on his size. It was cool to be able to meet dude even if it was for an hour or two. I learned a very important lesson that day that stuck with me.

The lesson was to take advantage of every opportunity and that fronting gets you nowhere. The fact of the matter was that some of my friends were taking a bunch photos with BIG and I was fronting trying to not seem like I was d*ck riding even though he was cool and actually at one point the one asking for more photos to be taken. Later on I ended up only getting one photo with dude that I cannot find for the life of me. I fronted on myself. It would have been nice to top this post off with said pictures. So yeah that day I learned that there’s really no future in fronting and being shy. Funny how such a short and random encounter could teach me something that would stick with me up to this day.

R.I.P. Christopher Wallace a true Brooklyn King.