Music impresario Diddy bestowed Jay-Z with the highest of compliments by telling his fellow hip-hop legend that he more than adequately filled the mammoth shoes left by Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace.
Diddy was speaking during the Twitter Space event that was facilitated by Tidal as part of the commemoration of what would have been Biggie’s 50th birthday. He heaped effusive praise on his fellow mogul.
“You filled those shoes, though,” Diddy told Jay. “You came in and we definitely give thanks. You definitely came, and I just know how much Big really looked up to Jay. They looked up to each other. That is crazy you had to step into the shoes of two people. That’s all it was was those two people. They had things on lock.”
Humbly, Jay explained that the void left by 2Pac and Biggie was vast when both archrivals were killed within six months of each other 25 years ago.
“That’s a big void,” Jay admitted, before adding that “others stepped in to fill it as well, not just myself.”
Hov was a rising star who’d just dropped his debut album, the classic Reasonable Doubt, in 1996 as the days of Pac and Biggie were numbered. By the time the rapper born Shawn Carter unleashed his sophomore CD, In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, both Biggie and Pac were gone.
“Hov was coming,” Diddy explained to the audience about Jay-Z, “but it was like these two cats was just so big … I think Hov kept the art of it going and took where they was at and took it even higher.”
Biggie was honored on Saturday, May 21, 2022, by New York with commemorative MetroCards, murals throughout the city, and a crown atop the Empire State Building.
Check out a portion of what Diddy and Jay-Z said about Biggie and Tupac:
