“I think it should be ‘One More Chance.’ ” His boss asked him what it should be if not “Machine Gun Funk.” But as a single? In particular, a summer single? That didn’t sit well with him. The next single was going to be “Machine Gun Funk.” Stone loved the Easy Mo Bee-produced heatrock, which was one of the hardest on the entire album.

Rob Stone was in a marketing meeting at Arista when he heard the news. He was in the studio with pop icons like Michael Jackson for the record “This Time Around.” But Puffy Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, was also looking for Biggie’s next single.

Big wasn’t just in-demand in rap circles, either. And his feature on Total’s smash hit “ Can’t You See” made the opening lines, “Gimme all the chicken heads from Pasadena to Medina,” as infectious as anything to come out that year. His “Flava in Ya Ear (Remix)” verse was blazing the clubs. Big had more than enough product on the streets. “ Big Poppa,” with “Warning” on the B-side, showed that just as easily as Big could take your girl, he could eliminate haters trying to stick him for his paper.īy the summer of 1995, Bad Boy Records was in full swing, and it was Big leading the charge. “ Juicy,” from 1994’s Ready to Die, was an undeniable success out the gate and served as a pristine introduction for the Notorious B.I.G. But that meant that the decisions about which tracks were singles was crucial.

Instead of every track hitting streaming services instantly on the release date, labels carefully doled out singles over many months, boosting album sales and keeping an artist in the spotlight. In the nineties, an album had a much longer shelf life than it does today. Excerpted from It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World that Made Him.

The notorious big one more chance