Big L

Lamont Coleman was born on the thirtieth of May 1974 at Harlem, New York, the youngest of three sons of Charlene Coleman — a Harlem postal worker — and Vernon Coleman, a New York public-school custodian. He was raised at the Lincoln Houses public-housing project of East Harlem at 139th Street and Lenox Avenue. He attended Julia Richman High School at the Upper East Side and dropped out in his junior year in 1991.

He took up rapping at fourteen in 1988 at the local Harlem 139th Street school-yard battles. He was a member from 1991 of the Children of the Corn collective with Cam'ron, Bloodshed and Mase. He recorded his first commercial demonstration at the small Hush Productions studio in late 1992 and signed with Columbia Records in 1993 on the strength of the demonstration. He released the album Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous in March 1995. The album sold modestly in its first year and produced the singles Put It On and No Endz, No Skinz — the recordings that established his Harlem 139th Street street-narrative voice and his distinctive cluster-of-internal-rhymes lyric technique.

Columbia released him from his contract in 1996 following the modest commercial reception. He founded the small Flamboyant Entertainment label in 1998 at his Harlem 139th Street home. He recorded across late 1998 and early 1999 a second album — The Big Picture — for the Flamboyant label and was completing the album mixing at the time of his death.

He was a foundational figure of the late-1990s Harlem hip-hop underground and was widely regarded by his contemporaries — particularly Jay-Z, Cam'ron and Nas — as one of the principal lyricists of his cohort.

He was shot nine times on the fifteenth of February 1999 at the corner of West 139th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem at approximately eight thirty in the evening. He was pronounced dead at the Harlem Hospital twenty minutes later. He was twenty-four.

The Big Picture album was completed posthumously and released by Flamboyant in August 2000. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Independent Album chart.

He is honored here as the principal local-circuit lyricist of late-1990s Harlem hip-hop.