There are a handful of events that hip-hop fans will always remember, like the first time they heard Fear of a Black Planet, the day they saw the premiere of Tupac's "California Love" video or the fact that Jay-Z's The Blueprint came out on September 11, 2001. March 9 is one of those days, as it will forever be remembered as the day that Notorious B.I.G. (also known as Biggie Smalls and as his birth name Christopher Wallace) died after being gunned down in Los Angeles.
Biggie and his crew had just left a party following the Soul Train Awards and were stopped at a traffic light when another car pulled up next to them and opened fire on Biggie's vehicle. Since he was in the passenger seat, Biggie took the brunt of the shots that ultimately lead to his death. The execution was eerily similar to the shooting death of rival Tupac in Las Vegas some six months earlier, and many speculated at the time that Biggie's death was the final straw of the East Coast/West Coast feud between Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records. Despite the number of eyewitnesses, Biggie's murder remains unsolved.
In a macabre twist of fate, the Notorious B.I.G.'s death came only a handful of days before the release of his second album, which was already set to be called Life After Death. Though he only released a single collection while he was still alive (1994's game-changing Ready to Die), Biggie's legacy as one of the best MCs to ever rhyme words with a beat is set in stone. Unlike Tupac, Biggie didn't leave behind a wealth of material, and the posthumous albums collecting B.I.G.'s freestyles and demo recordings have ranged from middling to downright blasphemous. Still, there's "Dead Wrong," the imagined team-up with Eminem that appeared on Life After Death. It's a reasonable horrorcore tune, but the video is the real treat, full of behind-the-scenes clips of a genius at work and at play. Christopher Wallace was only 24 years old when he died, but the Notorious B.I.G. will live forever.