“The major labels reached into hip-hop and made it impossible to compete,” he says. “They’re in the market share business, not in the profit business. Indie labels can’t really spend two million dollars to make one million dollars, but the majors do it all the time.”
An indie label like Silverman’s might invest $5,000 on an advance for an up-and-coming act and make $50,000, or perhaps turn $25,000 into $1 million, with a bit of luck. Major labels, on the other hand, could afford to spend six or even seven figures to launch an act; if they failed, there was still plenty of money pouring in from massive back catalog sales as consumers gobbled up CDs, often duplicates of vinyl albums they already owned. Another difference: for a small label, one or two big-budget flops could ruin the company. But hip-hop had taken off, creating gaudy revenues for major labels, as well as for the rappers whose voices propelled hit songs and the producers who collected as much as $50,000 per track.
Even record store owners were finding new ways to make money. SoundScan, the arbiter of weekly record sales, generated its numbers by gathering figures from a portion of retailers and extrapolating the totals. But since the data outfit published the names of the retailers who served as recorders, Machiavellian music business operators often bribed store owners and employees with cash or free inventory to scan certain records multiple times. Silverman recalls his company doing that for one particular artist who ended up being scanned for more albums than Tommy Boy had actually manufactured.47
Time Warner wanted a piece of the hip-hop action, too, and paid $100 million for a 50 percent stake in Interscope, doling out the first $20 million in 1992 and the remaining $80 million in early 1995. By then, though, the explicit lyrics of Interscope’s Death Row acts had prompted protests from varied voices, including Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and C. DeLores Tucker, the chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women, who made a career of campaigning against rap music. Battered by boycotts, Time Warner began to explore a sale of its Interscope stake, which would rid the media giant of its association with Death Row.48
In February 1996, just days after Shakur released his raunchy All Eyez on Me—on one track he described his favorite sexual positions before pronouncing Dole “lame” and calling Tucker a “motherfucker”—Time Warner sold its Interscope stake to record company MCA for a whopping $200 million. MCA was a record label, not a mainstream consumer-facing company like Time Warner, and as a result, it seemed less of an interesting target to decency crusaders and politicians. And despite the controversy, Time Warner had been able to flip the parent of Death Row for twice its purchase price.
Publicly, Shakur continued to up the ante with his lyrical attacks, most notably with “Hit ’em Up” in the spring of 1996. Jay-Z got involved in the conflict, calling out undisclosed parties for “too much West Coast dick-licking,” while Shakur lobbed a grenade at Jay-Z in a track released after his death, rapping, “I’m a Bad Boy killer; Jay-Z die, too.”
But even Shakur privately seemed to be growing concerned about the level of violence following him at Death Row. He’d been dating Kidada Jones, the daughter of superproducer Quincy Jones, who started talking to the rapper about getting a fresh start at another label, where he could focus on music and his burgeoning career as an actor; with roles in Juice and Above the Rim already under his belt, he had a handful of others in the pipeline. Some sources close to Shakur say that he admitted to being unhappy with his record deal in the final months of his life; at around the same time, he fired his lawyer, who was also Death Row’s official attorney. Many observers took this as a sign that Shakur wanted to jump ship. He also had about 150 unreleased tracks in the Death Row vault, and some believe Knight feared that his top artist would leave and take those recordings with him.49
On September 7, 1996, Shakur was fatally shot in Las Vegas while sitting in the passenger seat of a black BMW 7 series. The driver? Knight, who left the scene with barely a scratch. In the wake of Shakur’s killing, Snoop Dogg left Death Row, publicly blaming Knight for his friend’s demise. Others shared his opinion. In addition to scores of online conspiracy theorists, people who were actually in the Death Row crew have made their views clear. “I just don’t see how all these hard-core niggas who had been around Suge and Pac all that time—always packin’ heat—could let a car dump on them, in a lot of traffic, and no one got one shot at the assailants,” wrote Williams. Still others pointed to Orlando Anderson, a Crip with whom Shakur and Knight had brawled earlier that night, as the assailant. Says author Jeff Weiss: “Kind of in general, it’s not a good idea to beat up Crip members.”50
It wasn’t long before Biggie suffered the same fate as Tupac. Leaving the Soul Train Awards in Los Angeles on March 8, 1997, Biggie and Diddy hopped into a pair of SUVs. Biggie sat in the passenger seat in the front vehicle—and moments after leaving the ceremony, a gunman pulled up alongside him and fired seven shots into his chest. He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center shortly thereafter.
Investigations into the murders have pointed toward corrupt current and former employees of the LAPD, members of the Crips and Bloods, and, perhaps most prominently, Knight himself. Retired LAPD detective Russell Poole became the first to accuse officers in the force’s Rampart Division—home to dozens of officers revealed to have had ties to the Bloods and to Knight, who paid off-duty cops to serve as Death Row security—of conspiring to murder Biggie, but he died of natural causes before he could make much progress with the case. (Poole was also convinced that Shakur’s killer had come from within Death Row.)51 The documentary Biggie and Tupac suggests that Knight believed Shakur had been preparing to sue Death Row over unpaid royalties and had commissioned his murder, later ordering a hit on Biggie to make Shakur’s death seem like part of the East Coast–West Coast feud.
In 2008, journalist Chuck Philips sourced FBI files in a Los Angeles Times exposé connecting an associate of Diddy’s to the 1994 attack on Shakur at Quad Studios, but the documents were later discovered to be fake. Implicating Diddy in Shakur’s killing, as some have tried to do, seems far-fetched. If one ascribes a real-gangster murderous streak to the erstwhile reality TV star, a key question remains: why would he go through the effort of ordering a hit on Shakur and not kill the more menacing Knight? Speculation that Diddy played a role in Biggie’s death is even more illogical. Unlike the prolific Shakur, the rotund rapper left behind only enough material to fill two studio albums. Diddy profited from them, to be sure, but if he were cold-bloodedly calculating the spoils of assassinating his best friend, surely he would have concluded that the returns on a full career of records and joint touring would have been far greater. And Diddy’s eventual solo success, boosted by Biggie’s verses on his debut album, was far from guaranteed. “I don’t think anyone really saw that coming,” says Weiss. “I mean, you know, he was a backup dancer.”52
With Death Row’s artists fleeing the label—and the world of the living—Knight began a steady decline, propped up by only Shakur’s posthumous albums. (Seven were released through Death Row and/or Interscope, and six went platinum.) In 2005, a California judge directed the label to pay $107 million to Lydia Harris, the (now ex-) wife of incarcerated drug kingpin Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who claimed to have helped fund Death Row in the early 1990s. Knight forked over just $1 million before filing for bankruptcy in 2009.53 The accoutrements of his empire were soon auctioned off, from his copy of the Bible ($325) to the Death Row electric chair ($2,500). Perhaps appropriately, the latter was sold to the owner of a company called Hostility Clothing.54
All the while, violence continued to surround Knight. He earned a sentence of nine years in prison in 1997 for having racked up eight arrests and six probations since 1987, but he got out after five years. He ended up back in jail in 2002, after the authorities stopped by the Death Row headquarters and found him associating with gang members, thereby violating his parole. Released again in 2003, he almost immediately landed a ten-month bid for attacking a parking lot atten
dant in Hollywood. He largely avoided incarceration for the next decade, but still managed to get into plenty of trouble: he reportedly paid an associate to punch Dr. Dre at the Vibe Awards in 2004, got shot in the leg at a Miami party in 2005, ended up in the hospital after a fight in Arizona in 2009, and got shot six times at a nightclub in 2014. (Reportedly, he strolled to the sidewalk under his own power to wait for the ambulance.)55
Fittingly, the altercation that resulted in Knight’s latest lockup occurred on the set of the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. He drove up in his truck and got into an argument—and proceeded to run over two men, injuring Fab’s friend Cle “Bone” Sloan and slaying businessman Terry Carter, and then fleeing the scene. “It was simple. He was trying to kill my man,” says Fab. “He killed somebody else by mistake.”56
A surveillance camera captured the incident; gruesome clips of the event are widely available on the Internet. Knight claimed that he had acted in self-defense, and pleaded not guilty to charges including hit-and-run, attempted murder, and murder. As this book went to press, he was in jail, awaiting trial. Biggie and Tupac’s cases remain unsolved.
“Nobody went to jail for either murder,” laments rapper Too Short. “We killed our heroes. Those are our number one guys. What the fuck?”57
Voletta Wallace had never listened to one of her son’s albums all the way through until one particularly tough day in the late 1990s, a couple of years after his death.
“I was here by myself one day… and I was hearing such negative things about him,” she sighs. “‘He’s a drug dealer millionaire who don’t know what to do with money.’ ‘You live by the sword, you die by the sword.’ It was awful. I was hurting. I said, ‘You know what?’ I’m going to put this album on.”58
She sat down and played Life After Death—“the one with ‘Hypnotize,’” as she calls the album—and found herself getting to know a new side of her son. Initially afraid of what she might uncover, she instead ended up relishing the chance to hear his voice telling stories she hadn’t yet heard, even if she didn’t appreciate the subject matter. As she listened to the record from beginning to end, it almost seemed that he was there, talking and joking with her, once again.
“I cried like a baby… I said, ‘My God, that’s a very talented young man,’” she remembers. “That album gives me more respect for the rappers, because I was judging them, too. I was judging them. Here are these kids with their ugly clothes, their ugly hats. They dress terrible… I told my son once, ‘You look terrible.’ I said, ‘If you’re going on national TV, please don’t embarrass me.’”
In the end, she’s become fiercely proud of her son and his musical legacy, despite the fact that much of it contradicts the beliefs to which she clings. She still doesn’t buy much of what others have said about Biggie, especially the darker theories of his role in the Death Row feud. Perhaps it’s just a case of a loving mother refusing to believe anything negative about her son, but Voletta views the entire conflict as a mirage created by record labels and the media.
She remembers one particular conversation with her son about Tupac. “Christopher, why are you hanging around with him and he’s saying such terrible things about you?” she asked. “He goes, ‘Ma, I approached Tupac and all Tupac said [was], “Hey, I’m just selling music.”’… I don’t think my son resented Tupac… I don’t think Tupac resented my son either.”
Though that’s possible, it does seem that real enmity flared between the two artists in the final years of their lives, even if they had no desire to inflict violence upon each other. After Biggie died, Voletta did her best to move forward, even reaching out to Afeni Shakur to try and build a more peaceful legacy for their sons; the two became good friends before Afeni passed away in 2016.
Voletta has gotten over her initial distaste for Diddy, too—she’s having lunch with him tomorrow, she says—partly because of the grace with which he handled her son’s death; he was always checking in on her and asking if she needed anything. “He was there for me,” she explains. “He really grows on you. He’s a sweet kid. Sometimes I want to slap the daylights out of him, but he’s a sweet kid.”
Ask her about Knight, though, and it’s as if a thundercloud immediately passes overhead. The mere mention of the man seems to test the faith that tells her to leave judgment to a higher power, and with considerable effort, she does.
“What I read about him is very dark,” she says. “I believe if you do wrong, if you murder, whatever you do, there is an Almighty above. I call him Jehovah.” Her voice rises now, crackling with righteous conviction, and suddenly she’s addressing Knight directly. “You will get your day, because judgment is His,” she continues, gazing skyward. “He sees your wrongs and he sees your good, too. Whatever you do, you will get it.”
At this moment, she’s speaking with such electric confidence that if she told me Jehovah was going to unleash a monsoon right there in the living room, I’d grab an umbrella. Instead, she looks back at me.
“Right now, if he’s a good man… I hope he is,” she says. “If he’s a bad man, let him deal with God.”
CHAPTER 5
Aftermath
I interviewed Diddy several times before this book came about, and perhaps the last word I’d use to describe him is “nervous.” In person or over the phone, alone or in a group, he exudes swagger the way a lightning bug emits neon glow. Take, for instance, his 2013 proclamation when he decided that my estimates of his wealth for Forbes had reached an appropriate level: “You started learning how to count right, I see,” he told me. “Thank God!”1
You’ll imagine my surprise, then, when I meet up with him in Austin, Texas, shortly before our main stage keynote discussion at the 2014 edition of the music-tech-film conference South by Southwest—and I find him worrying. Sweating slightly through his dark brown shirt, perhaps selected to disguise precisely such an eventuality, he almost pleads with me to tell him that he’s going to be fine onstage; it hasn’t occurred to me that he’d be anything but. Perhaps to hide his concern, he dons a wholly unnecessary pair of sunglasses as we stroll onto the dais.
“I just want to tell y’all that I’m nervous up here,” he informs the crowd of a few hundred people crammed into a stuffy conference hall. “The louder that y’all are clapping makes me not nervous, so you know.”2
To be fair, the setup of the stage is a bit anxiety-inducing. Our awkwardly angled leather chairs—which face the audience but cause us to twist our necks to the side every time we look at each other—are more restrictive than the open stages across which Diddy is accustomed to stomping at shows. We’ve further complicated the eye contact situation by agreeing to accept questions from the audience via Twitter in real time, which requires me to spend much of the interview looking at my phone instead of my conversation partner.
Once we make it past the pleasantries, we delve right into Diddy’s latest venture: the multiplatform cable network known as Revolt. It emerged in 2012 when Comcast handed four moguls—including Diddy and former NBA star Magic Johnson—the keys to their own realms as part of a promise to bolster minority ownership after the company bought a chunk of NBCUniversal. Revolt started with its own channel, available in Comcast’s ten-million-plus cable boxes, and roughly tripled that number upon striking a carriage deal with Time Warner. According to Diddy, that made his network’s launch the biggest since Oprah Winfrey’s OWN.
I ask him about his inspiration for deciding to add a cable channel to an empire that by this point encompassed music, fashion, spirits, marketing, and startups. For Diddy, the answer goes back to his late friend Biggie, who he says dreamed of something similar as far back as the mid-1990s.
“We just always discussed not having to count on radio or any of the video music channels to be successful,” Diddy explains. “And we didn’t know that this day right here would come. But we always had a discussion about how we can take the power into our own hands.”
Then he starts waxing philosophical about what Biggie
’s career arc could have been, both musically and commercially.
“He probably would’ve been an R & B singer… He loved Luther Vandross,” says Diddy. “We probably would have put in a bid for Hennessy or something. He would have had Hennessy, I would have Cîroc.”
It’s a bit difficult to imagine Biggie transitioning from a career as a rapper known for glorifying brutal mafia dons (and occasionally finding himself in the middle of real-life violence) to that of an R & B crooner with interests in cable television and high-end spirits. The same could have been said of Diddy—and yet that’s exactly how his narrative evolved, starting shortly after the loss of his friend.
The violent deaths of Biggie and Tupac put a serious damper on hip-hop’s spirits, but as often happens when musicians pass away unexpectedly, sales exploded. By the end of the 1990s, the genre outpaced even country music in America and was climbing charts in untapped markets from Scandinavia to New Zealand.
Diddy had emerged as hip-hop’s most visible face, and the one best positioned to monetize the genre’s popularity. In 1996, with his star rising, he had negotiated a new Bad Boy deal that guaranteed him double-digit millions in the form of bigger budgets and a fifty-fifty split of profits. He was also given a chance to release his own album, No Way Out, a notion that had initially caused Arista’s executives to balk.3
But in 1997, when Diddy launched the lead single “I’ll Be Missing You,” an ode to Biggie set to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” it became the first rap song to premiere atop the Billboard Hot 100. With Diddy rapping the verses and Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, singing the chorus with fellow Bad Boy act 112, the song helped Diddy’s album move 561,000 copies its first week, eventually racking up sales of over seven million.4 (A source close to the rapper confirmed that Sting only cleared the sample after securing 100 percent of the publishing for “I’ll Be Missing You.”) New pal Jay-Z appeared on two of the album’s tracks, Biggie graced four posthumously, and Bad Boy freshman Mase showed up on “Been Around the World” and “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” (The latter gave a nod to hip-hop’s early days with its prominent sample of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” though the materialistic thrust of the Bad Boy song offered a very different sort of takeaway.)
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