From Rags to Riches
At the start of his major hit in 1994, “Juicy”, Biggie Smalls said, “Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that said I would never amount to nothing. To all the people that lived above the buildings I was hustling in front of that called the police on me when I was just trying to make some money to feed my daughter…and to all the homies in the struggle.” At heart, Biggie Smalls was a sterling young man who came from a poverty-stricken background in Brooklyn. Even though he had an amazing personality and was superior in school, he realized at a young age that he came from an area that typically did not give people like him many chances to be successful. In a way, society saw Biggie as just another average young black male from the projects of Brooklyn that probably would not make it far in life, but he knew he had a gift that the world had never heard before and he made it his dream to prove it.
Born as Christopher George Latore Wallace on May 21, 1972 in Brooklyn, Biggie grew up in the neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. As a young kid, it was always Biggie’s dream to be one of the best rappers of all time. With this in mind, he was similar to many other kids growing up in the poverty-stricken projects of Brooklyn that came from single-parent families without much money to spend. Growing up in these circumstances, it was hard for Biggie to see his dream of having a chance to come true. What made it worse was that he was surrounded by drug addicts and dealers at a very young age. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Brooklyn was highly known as a place of deadly crime and widespread drug-related activity. This was a major cause of why Biggie was absorbed by the life going on all around him and joined the dope business while he was still in his younger teens. He once said, "Everything happened on the strip I grew up in. It didn't matter where you went, it was all in your face." Through it all, Biggie still rapped everywhere he...