Lance Rivera Reflects on Biggie Hearing “Hit ’Em Up” for the 1st Time
Written by SOURCE on May 9, 2023
Lance “Un” Rivera, whose early career is closely interwoven with that of the Notorious B.I.G.’s, recently sat down for an extended interview during which he reflected on key moments in the late artist’s history.
Among them, as seen below, was the first time Biggie heard 2Pac’s diss record “Hit ‘Em Up.” In the track’s opening lines, as fans will note, 2Pac claimed to have had sexual relations with Biggie’s wife at the time, Faith Evans. Looking back on his and Biggie’s first time hearing the track, Rivera explained to DJ Vlad just how shocking the track was at the time. Additionally, as Rivera detailed, Biggie was adamant on not worrying about a response at the time.
“All of a sudden Pac comes home [from jail] and we’re at a video shoot,” Rivera said, as seen above. “Somebody plays ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ for us and we all looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck just happened?’ Because, like I said, that record was hot. It was big. Me personally, like I said, I’m ready to go to war. I wanted to shoot a video the next day and make a song the next day and make one of those videos targeting Suge [Knight] and Death Row. Big was like, ‘Nah, we not gonna do anything. We’re not gonna even respond.’”
From there, Vlad brought up a 2017 interview Rivera did with DJ Self, specifically his assertion that Biggie had “cried like a baby” when hearing the Faith Evans line.
“He cried like a baby,” Rivera said in 2017 when pushing back against the “inaccuracies” of Biggie’s story, adding that both Pac and Big would be telling “a different story” if they were alive. “If you’re gonna tell it, tell. … It’s just that.”
The new Rivera interview arrives amid coverage of a podcast appearance by Fat Joe, who opened up on an episode of Angie Martinez’s Iconic Records about how Big Daddy Kane “saved” him from having to freestyle during a classic Biggie and 2Pac cypher in 1993.
