From the moment said it, it felt wrong. When the disgraced Bad Boy Entertainment founder rapped, on ’s “Mo Money Mo Problems,” that “ten years from now, we’ll still be on top,” it was in that flat preening monotone. Hip-hop’s commercial trajectory appeared to be such that he and his peers might keep accumulating yachts, but the dynasty he envisioned never seemed credible.
By the time that song was finally released as a single, on July 15, 1997, Big had been dead for more than four months, and Puff’s Police-sampling elegy, “I’ll Be Missing You,” was already a No. 1 hit. In the video for “Mo Money,” when Puff raps the “ten years” line, he’s standing next to in one of those glittering wind tunnels; they flit between different outfits and setups, their shimmying intercut with a team of dancers given slightly more robust choreography.
Eventually we see archival footage of Big, presented with all the care and solemnity of the clips that play as you wait in line at Universal Studios. Big’s assassination left a vacuum in New York hip-hop. and would move to fill it, each succeeding in different ways; even with the momentum waning, was regrouping to prepare for ; Big Pun was getting acrobatic; underneath all of this, Zev Love X had reemerged, rapping with stockings over his face at the Nuyorican Poets Café as .
At every strata, in little venues with sticky floors and yawning boardrooms alike, artists seemed to be competing not only for commercial sup.