This year, for their annual “Icon†issue, FADER turns its focus to a very worthy subject: the Notorious B.I.G. As part of the package, the magazine got Diddy to sit down and open up about his pal. And while the Q&A is not yet online (and the issue not out until May 3), FADER was nice enough to let us check it out early.
Diddy does address the impact of Biggie’s murder, and his relationship with his onetime protégé’s music today. But our favorite bits are when he explains what Big was like day-to-day. For example:
What was he like around women?
Around women he was a charmer. He didn’t really make the first move, and a lot of times it just happened from, “Pleased to meet you.†He would get introduced to people and when he said “pleased to meet you†to a girl it rang a different way. I guess they was caught off guard by how much of a gentleman he was, how smooth he was and also how he didn’t try to continue on the conversation. That made her feel comfortable. They’d lay in the cut, something else would happen, and then they’d start laughing. They’d see the humor and it was a wrap.
What is your most vivid memory of Biggie?
When I think of him I think of him sitting in a room by himself, rocking back and forth, smoking a blunt down almost to the roach of it, doing that for hours in deep thought while writing. His mouth is not moving, he’s not mimicking what he’s going to do in the booth. It was him in deep, spiritual rap meditation.
Listening to him rhyme, he always seemed so worldly.
I don’t know where he got that stuff from … I don’t really understand how he knew all that stuff. I never saw him reading a lot of magazines, reading a lot of books, watching a lot of TV, watching a lot of movies. I think he was just put on the earth this way.
“Pleased to meet you!†Try it at home, folks.