Rockstar Games delayed the release of Grand Theft Auto III, which takes place in a fictional version of New York, in part to remove a mission involving terrorists. Marvel edited trailers for Spider-Man, slated for release in May 2002, and removed a scene of Peter Parker trapping a helicopter between the towers with a web. 11, 2001.Īfter the attacks, media companies erupted in a riot of self-censorship. The “Juicy” lyric remained untouched until Sept. Just three years after his debut single, Biggie was murdered in Los Angeles in 1997 his songbook became rap canon and he achieved cultural immortality. Enuff, who was born Ephram Lopez, worked for Biggie as his road disc jockey in the 1990s and is now, due to his long tenure, the station’s unofficial historian. “No,” says DJ Enuff, a longtime disc jockey for New York’s Hot 97 station. Did the reference to a recent deadly terror attack stir consternation? While Biggie’s second, posthumous album Life After Death would go diamond in the U.S., “Juicy” was initially just a modest success, peaking at No. “Getting paid + blowing up like the world trade = an image of money expanding rapidly.”
“Those lines contain a metaphor, which compares seemingly different ideas to create one powerful image/idea,” explains Rap Genius contributor “TANSTAFFL” in a notation painfully deliberate even for the site. But despite his closeness to the events, there is no indication that Wallace intended to make a statement on geopolitical events. In the opening verse, Biggie dropped the “blow up like the World Trade” line. In August 1994, Biggie released “Juicy,” the first single on his debut album Ready to Die. One of the conspirators in the 1993 attack was a middle-aged African-American convert named Clement Rodney Hampton-El, a medical technician and former mujahid in Afghanistan.
Notorious big ready to die censoring crack#
Biggie, who had started dealing crack at 15 in the neighborhood before committing to rap, was likely aware of this community. Congregants armed with knives and pistols operated 24-hour anti-drug patrols. In 1988, Masjid At-Taqwa, a mosque popular with African-American converts, coordinated with police to eject dealers from a dozen local crack dens. Smoke from the World Trade Center was visible from Fulton Street in his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he later shot parts of the “Juicy” music video.īedford-Stuyvesant was also home to several mosques and a growing community of African-American converts to Islam. He was well placed to observe the 1993 bombing and its aftermath. But at the time, most Americans viewed the World Trade Center attack as an isolated incident, and even New Yorkers’ attention soon drifted to more pressing issues – rampant crime, racial tensions and squeegee men.Ī few miles away in Brooklyn, Christopher “ Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace was rising through the city’s hip-hop underground. Historians now consider the bombing the first salvo in a two-decade (and counting) global jihadist offensive against the West. The attackers were Islamic radicals inspired by Omar Abdel-Rahman, an influential Egyptian sheikh who had recently moved to the United States. The blast killed six people, including a pregnant woman, and tore a 100-foot-deep crater in the garage. America’s war on terror may have begun on September 11, 2001, but the roots of this mystery lead to a snowy morning 24 years ago.Īt 12:18 pm on February 26, 1993, a rented Ford Econoline carrying a 1,200-pound bomb exploded in the parking garage below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Psychologists even posit that it may be warping our historical memory.ĭiscovering how the lyric was cut – and why that edit persists – requires delving into the past. For the rapper’s devotees, the edit fuels recriminations and frustration. Among 9/11 truthers, it fuels conspiracy theories that Biggie predicted the attack – or perhaps even helped plan it. But for a sub-set of listeners, the edit has become an obsession. In the era of Spotify and iTunes, the ongoing censorship has slipped past the radars of many Biggie fans since the original is available so readily via streaming. Today, radio listeners still hear 1.5 seconds of eerie silence where the last rhyme once rang.
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