The ridiculous price Biggie Smalls paid for ‘Unbelievable’
As music fans will know, it’s not just the musician who makes the track, but a whole host of crew too: a good producer can turn a tune from good to legendary.
DJ Premier is such a producer. Often celebrated as one of the hip hop genre’s greatest, the Texas-born producer – who is also a DJ in his own right – has worked with the likes of Drake, Biggie Smalls, Eminem, Kanye West, J. Cole, Nas and Common, among many others.
Speaking to Music Week in 2023, DJ Premier discussed some of the songs that have come to define not just his career, but the entire genre, too. With tunes that include Nas’s N.Y. State of Mind and Mos Def’s Mathematics, there were many revelations from the interview.
One such truth is that of the story behind Biggie Smalls’s Unbelievable. Released as the sixteenth track from 1994’s Ready to Die, the legendary rapper’s debut received near-universal acclaim at the time of release, and is credited for restoring prominence to the East Coast hip-hop scene when their West Coast counterparts were leading the charge.
“B.I.G. needed a song for the street because he already had his mainstream record Juicy and he wanted a B-Side for it – so it’s actually the first gold single I ever got,” recalled DJ Premier.
“B.I.G. asked me for a beat [when I was really busy] but he just had a way of getting through to you [laughs]. He was genuine, and I loved that about him. Is it true I only charged him $5,000 for Unbelievable? Absolutely, but I said, ‘I’m going to triple it or quadruple it [for songs in future] if you get huge and blow up.’ When it came to Life After Death, the first beat I gave him was Kick In The Door and I told him, ‘This time I’m gonna charge you…’. He said, ‘I told you that I would pay it’. And he paid the cheque!”
Both a critical and commercial success upon release, Ready to Die peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200. Its most notable songs, naturally, include Juicy, Big Poppa and One More Chance, with Big Poppa nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance in 1996.
In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 133 on the magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, bumping it to a stellar 22 in a 2020 revisited list.
All in all, it was a busy year for DJ Premier. 1994 also saw a collaboration with Nas over N.Y State of Mind, in which the producer said “Well, he was called ‘The Rapper Nas’ – every Queens artist back then would call themselves ‘The Rapper…’ something. He played me Main Source’s Live At The Barbeque, and I was like, ‘This is about to be a big record!’”
“Nas was the talk of the neighbourhood way before he did Illmatic,” DJ Premier continued. “For N.Y. State Of Mind, Nas was in the studio when I was looking for samples. I had the drums and the [chiming sound] playing over and over but I was looking for some groove. When the piano part came in on the Joe Chambers record I had, we just looked at each other. Nas was sat right in front of me and said, ‘Hook that up!’ He just pulled out the pen and pad and started writing!”