Diddy Explains Why Prince Refused To Be On Biggie’s Life After Death (Video)

Today (March 25) marks the 20th anniversary of the release of The Notorious B.I.G.’s album, Life After Death. Released just two weeks after he was killed in Los Angeles, the album served as a bittersweet tribute to the MC the world had just lost. For inhabitants of NYC, and likely several other cities, it was impossible to walk the streets and not hear several cars blasting songs like “Hypnotize,” “The 10 Crack Commandments,” and “Sky Is The Limit,” in the weeks following the album’s release.

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In celebration of the album, Sean “Puffy” Combs spoke with his Revolt team about 2 little known facts regarding the album. First, he detailed the writer’s block that inhibited B.I.G. prior to the album being recorded and, perhaps, potentially almost derailed it altogether. “A lot of people don’t know that B.I.G. stopped working for a while. He had a writer’s block and just an idea block. It lasted like six, seven months. We kind of kept it quiet. And during that time he started getting in trouble, got into a car accident. A whole bunch of stuff was just not going in the right direction. I just got with him and just really started explaining to him, ‘You know we could blow it, you know?’ He started kind of really believing in the hype and wasn’t really focused on the second album,” said Diddy. He then spoke of a trip to Trinidad, where he made “70% of the records” he did in the 90s, as the catalyst to break Biggie out of his Funk.Though Puff doesn’t state it explicitly, he suggested that Biggie’s competitive juices got flowing as he saw artists like Mary J. Blige, The LOX and Mase creating hit records in the environment.

Elsewhere in the interview, Diddy also spoke about a guest artist they were trying to get to participate on the album, that was near and dear to both of them. “Me and [Biggie] were Prince fans. But this came at a time when Prince wasn’t really rocking with hip-hop and clearing any samples. That really didn’t go too well…He would go through his phases and he came back to us and let us know how proud he was of us. He was really protective at one time of just what was going on with the ‘bitch’ and ‘hoe’ controversy. That was a real thing in Hip-Hop. That was a real reflection point in Hip-Hop when we were being asked to take responsibility and think about what we were saying.”

Two decades later, sadly both Prince and Biggie are gone, but their music lives on.