Credit: Alamy

The Notorious BIG knew talent when he heard it, and he was willing to give credit where credit was due. Equally, when a fellow musician made bad music, he generally wasn’t afraid of letting his true thoughts be known about it. But there was one artist that he was disappointed with in the mid-’90s, yet just couldn’t bring himself to diss.

In 1995, Biggie sat down for an interview with a Canadian magazine called Peace, during which he spoke about a lot of his rap contemporaries. He didn’t sugar-coat his criticisms for those he felt weren’t operating at their best, though he readily praised those he thought were doing good things. But his most conflicted opinion, arguably, came when it came to fellow East Coast rapper Redman.

Snippets of this interview have been circulating online for years, and, in the section about Redman, Biggie is clearly a little bit torn up. He’s obviously a fan of Redman, but, as for the newer music that he was making at that point in time, Biggie just wasn’t that into it. He was careful with his words, though. He knew the talent that Redman had, so he didn’t want to inadvertently end up beefing with him.

Rating Redman’s music with a healthy, but not amazing, seven out of ten, Biggie remarked, “I can’t diss him ’cause I know he got skills. He gets busy on the lyrics, but I can’t feel his new shit, his new cosmic crazy shit.”

Clearly the direction of Redman’s sensibility around this period was not to Biggie’s liking, as he was more taken with more the old-school style. “I’m used to the clean cut blowout fly n***a,” Biggie said. “When I met the n***a he was a fly n***a, you know what I’m sayin’? Now he on some different shit.” 

As Biggie seemed to understand it, Redman’s early successes had gone to his head a bit, and he had consequently changed his style. “I really don’t like when a rapper come out and they blow up the way they are and they come out again on some changed up shit,” he said. 

The analogy Biggie then used to illustrate his point was somewhat unorthodox. “To me,” he began, “that’s like getting some good coke from poppy and then getting some money and then be like, ‘Fuck that! I’m getting some more 45ths, some brown shit and then bag that up.’ Why would you change your plan? That’s what he did to me.”

To be fair, the drug analogy wasn’t a million miles from the truth of what was going on with Redman. Given that Biggie was speaking in ’95 here, it seems likely that he was comparing Redman’s first and second albums, which exhibited notable stylistic changes. The second record, Dare Iz a Darkside, had come out in late ’94, and even Redman himself has steered clear of it since he put it out.

Reflecting on how much drugs he was taking around the time he was making the album, Redman told HipHopDX in 2010, “I swear, I have not played Dare Iz A Darkside damn near since I did it. Seriously! I was so lost, I was so fucked up during that album.” Biggie’s intuition about the record, then, was actually fairly on the money.