The Notorious B.I.G.

Christopher George Latore Wallace was born on the twenty-first of May 1972 at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City, the only child of Voletta Wallace, a Jamaican-born Brooklyn preschool teacher, and Selwyn George Latore, a welder who left the family when the boy was still small. Raised by his mother in the Clinton Hill neighborhood near the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, he grew into a sharp, watchful child of great size, earning early the nickname that would follow him: Big.

He came of age on Fulton Street amid the hard economy of the crack era, and the streets took him before the music did. Yet from his gift for words rose something rare: a voice of extraordinary flow, wit, and storytelling. Recording as The Notorious B.I.G., he became the principal voice of mid-1990s East Coast hip-hop, his low, unhurried delivery turning autobiography into art.

His 1994 debut, Ready to Die, made him a defining figure of his generation, and his verses lifted an entire New York scene alongside him. He married the singer Faith Evans and became a father. Then, drawn into the bitter East Coast–West Coast rivalry that shadowed the age, he was killed by gunfire in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles on the ninth of March 1997. He was twenty-four; the crime remains unsolved.

His second album, Life After Death, arrived weeks later and sealed his standing among the most gifted lyricists the form has known. May the boy from Brooklyn who turned his hardest streets into song be remembered, and honored.