The Notorious B.I.G.

Christopher George Latore Wallace was born on the twenty-first of May 1972 at the Saint Mary's Hospital of Brooklyn, the only child of Voletta Wallace — a Jamaican-born Brooklyn pre-school teacher — and George Latore, a Jamaican welder and local-politics organiser who left the household when Christopher was two. He was raised by his mother at the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn at the corner of Saint James Place and Fulton Street. He attended the George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School in Downtown Brooklyn — the same school attended in overlapping years by Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes — and dropped out in his junior year in 1989 at seventeen.

He spent the following two years in the Brooklyn drug economy — and one nine-month sentence at a North Carolina correctional facility for possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. He returned to Brooklyn in early 1992 and recorded a demonstration mix-tape at the local Clinton Hill studio engineer Mister Cee in late 1992. The Mister Cee mix-tape was passed in early 1993 to Matty Capoloungo — the editor of the Source magazine's Unsigned Hype column — and from there to Sean Combs at the new Bad Boy Records subsidiary of Arista Records.

He signed with Bad Boy in mid-1993 and released the single Party and Bullshit in August 1993. The album Ready to Die — recorded at the D&D Studios in Manhattan across late 1993 and early 1994 and released in September 1994 — sold over four million copies in its first two years and is now widely regarded by present consensus as one of the principal hip-hop albums of the 1990s.

He released across the following two years the singles Big Poppa, One More Chance, Hypnotize and the double album Life After Death of March 1997 — the latter completed in February 1997 in the weeks before his death.

He was shot four times in a stationary passenger sport-utility vehicle at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles on the ninth of March 1997 at twelve-forty-five in the morning. He was pronounced dead at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center less than an hour later. He was twenty-four.

He is honored here as the principal voice of mid-1990s East Coast hip-hop.