Goodfellas: the Nas and Biggie Smalls group that never was
The careers of Nas and the Notorious BIG were closely bound during their respective 1990s heydays.
Both of them released their debut albums in 1994—Nas’ Illmatic dropping first and Biggie’s Ready to Die following some months later—and the pair each emerged as leading figures of the East Coast scene. Biggie’s career and life were, of course, cut short following the fatal shooting in 1997, which put an end to, among other things, the prospect that he and Nas might ever collaborate. But there had, in fact, been plans to do so.
Nas has, over the years, spoken publicly of his admiration for Biggie, admitting that his peer’s work drove him forward and had an especially big impact on his second album, It Was Written, which he decided to make more accessible to listeners in light of the latter’s success with songs like ‘Juicy’ and ‘Big Poppa’. Rap critics at the time were unhappy with Nas’ shift to a poppier sound, but, as he explained in a 2023 interview with GQ, Biggie had shown that hitting the mainstream was possible without compromising one’s own art.
“These dudes didn’t want me to sell records,” Nas said of his critics from that time, adding, “They wanted me to stay on an underground level, and I understand what they mean a little bit. But at the same time, Biggie made it different, where you can’t just be the hot dude that they liked from New York to Connecticut to Virginia. You got to hit the mainstream. You got to touch the world.”
Nas and Biggie were friends, as well as rivals, and as such, they drove each other on but never actually got the chance to work together, despite plans being in the works for it. In another interview, this time on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2020, Nas admitted that there had been plans for him to write a verse for a remix of Biggie’s track ‘Gimme The Loot’, but he’d gotten too high to do it.
“I was in the studio and Big was rolling up some of that chocolate from Brooklyn and he didn’t warn me,” he said, “It was just…I was zonked out, yo. There’s pictures of that session out there. Yeah, we was supposed to do a couple of songs. I was gon remix some stuff for Ready to Die.”
Asked why they didn’t just complete the session the following day, Nas simply replied, “Still high. We were smokers, man, still am”.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of Nas-Biggie collaborations that never came to fruition, because, in addition to that, there had once been vague plans for the two of them to join together as a group called Goodfellas. This could have been an incredible project, but how close was it to actually happening? Was there music ever recorded and ready to be released?
“No, we didn’t get that far,” Nas told Rolling Stone in October 2025, reflecting on the plans for this Goodfellas project. “It was just like, ‘Yo, let’s go with this’. So life took us into different things. I went where I went, he went all the way with Bad Boy, and he built up what he built up… The wind just grabbed us and it was over. We was just going [in] separate directions.”
Such a frivolous reason behind what could have been an incredible example of teamwork, but then life throws curveballs when you least expect them. At least Nas is still around, making his own path and will keep doing so in the years to come.