dream hampton Witnessed the Making of 'Ready to Die' Up Close. Here's What She Remembers.

Several months ago, I saw a documentary that did something I believed was no longer possible, it showed me aspects of my favorite rapper I had never seen before. The film is called It Was All A Dream, and its magic is in the footage its director—the journalist and writer turned filmmaker dream hampton—captured. The movie, which is a collection of footage dream was holding on to, features an intimate look at The Notorious B.I.G. during the period following the release of Ready to Die. That album turns 30 years old today. It’s also dream’s birthday, a coincidence that borders on mystical when you consider how intertwined the writer and artist became, both while he was alive, and in carrying on his legacy.

The film, which premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, adds to Big’s historical record in several ways, showing an intimate side of him that we had previously only heard about in passing. It also adds to the historical record, as it comes while Biggie is launching Junior Mafia and in the wake of the simmering tension with the Wu-Tang Clan. That beef stemmed from the infamous “Shark Niggas (Biters)” skit on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, in which Raekwon and Ghostface Killah accused Big of being a biter because he “stole” the idea for his album cover from Nas’ Illmatic. (This subsequently led to a rift between Big and Nas, because Nas is featured on “Verbal Intercourse.”) None of it would’ve been possible without the incredible, unprecedented access dream got during this crucial period in Christopher Wallace’s short life.

dream once lived around the corner from Big, and was on the ground floor—both at The Source, where she worked, and in his life. When the Source's Unsigned Hype columnist Matty C anointed him the rap bible’s artist of the month, in March of 92, dream was there.

She was also literally riding shotgun during the the ascent that led to Ready to Die, and though she’s written frequently—and compelling—about that experience herself, particularly in light of her recent film, I wanted to talk to dream about her perspective on the making of the record, and some of the subsequent fallout covered in It Was All a Dream.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

What was your proximity to Biggie prior to recording Ready to Die?

I was on the staff of The Source when Biggie’s Unsigned Hype tape came in. I told Puff [Daddy] that Matty had an incredible tape that he should listen to. I was there for when Biggie went over around the corner on Grand Avenue to [rapper] Daddy-O's house, I went over there with him when he did the remix to “Real Love.” So I was there from the beginning of his career. He lived around the corner from me. I lived on Cambridge Place. He lived on St. James. I was one of the people who voted on Unsigned Hype because I was still on staff then. And then the process of making that album took a long time. Puff got fired. They were homeless for a minute in terms of a label for the project.

Puff got fired from Uptown, then he started Bad Boy.

Well, it wasn't that easy. I mean, he didn't just start his own label. There was a good half a year when Puff didn't have the label set up.

So in terms of sessions, are you in the room for any of the songs on Ready to Die?

His very first session for Ready to Die was a song that didn't make the album. It was at Platinum Island, and Big didn't really know how to get there. I was like, “Yo, just take the C to the F, and then get off at West Third.” And he said, “You coming with me,” because I used to go from our neighborhood to school every day. And so I ended up in his very first session.

Can you explain the Method Man interview regarding Big that happens in the middle of your film?

He's saying, “When I see Big, we can roll up. I fuck with Big, just because they don't fuck with him doesn't mean I don't fuck with him. I fuck with him. And Red doesn't fuck with any of you. Red just fucked with me.” So he's basically saying that him and Big have their own relationship.

Do you have any insight into how Meth felt about the beef with Wu-Tang Clan?

Well, by then, the camp is already splintered. [Wu-Tang Clan] starts to come apart almost as soon as they come out. I mean, that's a documentary. So it's very fractious in that crew. There's this feeling that Meth has some undue celebrity, amongst some of them. I'm not a Wu-Tang expert, but that was happening immediately. They were already having problems. But that’s not the Ready to Die story.

The Ready to Die story is that Bad Boy came out with a record that was an answer to [Dr. Dre's] The Chronic in every way. In terms of success, in terms of influence, in terms of being heard everywhere. And New Yorkers, the hip hop community in New York hated on Biggie. I mean, you had Jeru the Damaja, you had Pras and Wyclef. So everyone is taking these shots of him. He becomes the Beyoncé. He becomes the person to hate on.

Do you think that there's a chance that the reason why Ghost and Rae take that shot is because Meth shows up on the album and they were already looking at him sideways?

Not really, it was just a common street thing at the time to say it should’ve been Nas. Nas didn’t blow up like Biggie did. He didn't even go gold. And not just in terms of pure sales, in terms of access. People from Detroit weren't listening to Illmatic the way they were listening to Ready to Die. People in Memphis weren't listening to Illmatic the way they were listening to Ready to Die. Nas doesn't have that hit until “If I Ruled The World.”

Do you have any memory of the day Ready to Die came out?

I remember we went to this independent record store in Queens in the daytime. And I had a party that night at the Fez. But when we went into the store, they were like, no guns. We all had to come back out, and all the guys put their guns in my backpack. So I had all the guns in the store. I had like 11 guns. And I forgot to give it back to them. I hopped on a train because I had to go to my party.

So it’s the end of the day, Big was wrapping up at Tower Records, which was at Broadway and Great Jones. And I met Big outside the store to give him the guns back. And he had just married Faith [Evans]. I didn't meet her yet, but she came too, in a Land Cruiser, and she had a gun in the back of her jeans. It was all so ridiculous. I was like, “So this is your wife?” But anyway, yeah, I was the gun holder that day.

What was the vibe? Did they know it was a hit? I'm sure the singles gave them some impression that it was going to go, but did they know it was coming?

Matty C was in this camp, too, but I really thought that the single should be “Machine Gun Funk.” I was mad that it was “Juicy.” But by then, the video had been shot, and yeah, it was the thing.

In retrospect, how do you feel about the decision?

It was the right one. I mean, Puff was often right about that stuff.

So what I think is so cool about the doc, particularly the scenes with Big in the studio, is you see that he's just walking around with these bars floating around in his head, and they could have really landed anywhere. Like, he's going over the Saint Ides commercial with bars that end up on a track that he ends up using elsewhere later in his career-

Yeah, your article made Pudgee Tha Phat Bastard reach out trying to get some money.

Sorry!

No, it's okay. It's not your fault. He must have some Google alert on his name.

Raymond Boyd/Getty Images

But my question is when you’re watching him work, how much of the songs were fully formed in his head and how much of it was playing tetris with blocks of verse?

No, he definitely would conceive of a whole…He was like a novelist in that way. He would conceive of a story from top to bottom and then tell it. “I Got A Story to Tell,” “Things Done Changed,” “Warning,” those songs that are super visual. Those weren't like freestyles. I mean, they were freestyles in that he never wrote stuff down, but they were songs that he mapped out.”

So even that part, which I feel like is superfluous, in “I Got a Story to Tell” where he explains it as if people hadn’t just heard it, that’s something he would do with a D-Rock, or someone else before he made the song. He did that with me for “Warning.” Like, he would tell me the whole story, and then he would make the song.

I remember he came over to my place on South Elliot around 2:30 am. I came downstairs because I had two roommates. He was asking if I wanted to roll up. I was in my pajamas, and we sat on the stoop, and he told me the whole story about setting someone up and being able to see the laser in the night. And he said he wanted to do different voices like Slick Rick. And I was like, “Well, that'd be corny. Don't do an accent.” He's like, “No,. I'm going to be different characters.” He had it all in his head.

Where did the idea for the character “Biggie Smalls” come from?

Ice Cube said some of the most shocking things on his first two albums, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and Death Certificate. Cube makes a song about kicking a pregnant girl down the stairs, right? So there was this shock rap thing. There's a sub-genre happening at the time where people are just saying the most insane shit, trying to be shocking.

But the other part of it is one time I was trying to catch a cab, and if you lived in New York before Uber, you would sometimes have friends that were women or white people who would go up into the street and flag a car, then you would try to get in the car once a car got flagged. Often, when they saw Biggie, they would just take off. This happened one day on Avenue of Americas. We were coming from a studio, it was late at night. I flagged the car. The driver, who was Sikh, saw Biggie come from the shadows and started to take off, with my leg just hanging out the car. And so Biggie pulled out a gun and shot in the air to get him to stop, right? And he was like, “Man, why do these niggas always make me go in a beast mode?”

The whole “Black and ugly as ever” thing is all of that is stuff he's been told his whole life. It's how people react to him rather than who he is. And of course, it’s something that he would lean into sometimes because the world is wild and fucked up. But I never thought that he was ugly. I thought he had great teeth. When he had his daughter, I was like, "She looks just like you." You know what I'm saying? And so it was this undoing, I guess, of the messages that he had been receiving his whole life, people being afraid of him when he walked up onto the scene. So you had to lean into that role to do it in this exaggerated way that Bushwick Bill and Ice Cube were doing.

Was there any art he was really into that would be surprising besides Scarface and all the obvious touchstones of early '90s rap?

I knew him to be a [Charles] Dickens fan. He and I used to read Ntozake Shange together. I've written about him coming to my survey class with me and watching Battleship Potemkin, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He saw [François Truffaut movies] with me. It's New York, you know?

There's this narrative that has emerged where it's like, "He was going to leave Bad Boy. He hated working with Puff. He hated Puff." Do you have any perspective on their working relationship, at least during this period when Ready to Die was being made?

I was there for both albums. I know they didn't have a contentious working relationship. Puff is a cornball, and Biggie would tease him and call him Playboy, but it wasn't contentious, and he wasn't leaving him.

Can you offer some perspective as to how they worked together?

I don't want to talk about Puff at all right now because then that just becomes a full—yeah. No, thanks. That's a trap. Sorry.

It's happened to me about 11 times in the course of promoting his film. But yeah, the premise of the question isn't true. He wasn't looking to leave him. He was making them rich.

Was there anything that stuck out to you about that relationship that is notable?

Just that Puff made them do “Juicy” as the lead single. Everyone knows that, but that's a huge deal. It really defines the crossover success. He had his eye on The Chronic, and he was really not trying to get bested by Dre.

And in terms of their interpersonal relationship and how he convinced Big to turn away from “Machine Gun Funk”, was that an easy thing to do?

That's more him talking to [business partner Lance "Un" Rivera]. Un had more influence on him. I remember Big saying, “Puff wants me to wear suits. I'm going to look like Heavy D.” And I remember Un saying, “And my mother loves Heavy D. That'd be great.” And then Big being like, “I'm not going to be fucking dancing.” So I don't know. I didn't spend that much time with the two of them together. I was mostly with Biggie, not with Puff. But they're two different people. Big was a Gemini. They're gregarious. People love them. Puff is a Scorpio. They're dark. People loathe them.