The Los Angeles Times has retracted its controversial March 17 story “An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War,” which claimed that Sean “Diddy” Combs was aware that Shakur would be attacked in late November 1994, and that the attack was orchestrated by associates of the Bad Boy CEO. The paper acknowledged that it had been hoaxed by its “confidential sources” immediately following a March 27 debunking of the story on The Smoking Gun, but only today did it announce a full retraction of the original article, written by longtime Diddy conspiracy theorist Chuck Phillips.
Ray J, the 27-year-old brother of Brandy celebrating his first top ten hit, “Sexy Can I (feat. Yung Berg),” wants you to know that despite the attention he’s received for knocking boots with Whitney Houston and Kim Kardashian, he (somehow) still loves women. “A lot of people think of me as being an attention whore or a slut. And I’m not really that. I love being in front of the camera and entertaining. But I do respect women. I’m not disrespectful to anybody that I’m cool with. I just want people to know that I’m not a disrespectful pedophile.” Earlier in the same interview, J described the love and chronic Biggie and Tupac showed the then-underage singer immediately before their respective murders.
The latest limited-edition Notorious B.I.G. action figure will be available in April, and apparently the “Juicy”-inspired design features “towel, chain, sunglasses and mic” that are all removable. More »
Jamal “Gravy” Woolard, who made headlines in the spring of 2006 when he was shot in the butt outside the Hot 97 building, has been tapped to play the Notorious B.I.G. in Notorious, the Biggie Smalls biopic scheduled to hit theaters in 2009; the movie will also feature Angela Bassett as Biggie’s… More »
“Newly discovered evidence” and a fresh round of defendants (some of them [very] minor celebrities) have re-juiced the wrongful death lawsuit filed against the city of Los Angeles in Biggie’s 1997 homicide, which initially fingered two members of the LAPD, Rafael Perez and David Mack. More »
Someone needs to sit the also-17-years-old Soulja Boy down with this clip (originally from an MTV or VH1 documentary, if my Swiss cheese memory serves?) of the teenaged Biggie Smalls freestyling on a BK street corner, and give him the Ludovico until he promises to step his game up or quit. More »
Someone needs to sit the also-17-years-old Soulja Boy down with this clip (originally from an MTV or VH1 documentary, if my Swiss cheese memory serves?) of the teenaged Biggie Smalls freestyling on a BK street corner, and give him the Ludovico until he promises to step his game up or quit. More »
Who murdered Biggie? Apparently it’s not the LAPD. According to the LA Times, Waymond Anderson, a resident of the Los Angeles correctional system currently doing a life bid for murder and who had previously claimed two crooked cops helped take down the Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, “said in a recent deposition that he lied about LAPD involvement in the Smalls slaying as part of a ‘scam’ concocted by two other convicts to squeeze a large monetary settlement out of the city”:
Hey, are you a big fat guy (or a skinny guy willing to bulk up) with a lot of presence? Then you could be the one to play the Notorious B.I.G. in the upcoming (and long awaited) biopic. (It would probably also help if you were African-American, unless Todd Haynes is directing this thing.) More »
