But “Mo Money Mo Problems” isn’t really Biggie’s track. “Mo Money Mo Problems” is on Biggie’s Life After Death album, and Biggie is the credited lead artist and the best thing about the song.
They’re both triumphant party jams, songs for celebrating, and that’s how they were received. Biggie’s two chart-toppers, by contrast, aren’t even remotely sad. “I’ll Be Missing You” reached #1 in countries where Biggie himself was barely known, so that song hit some kind of cultural chord that went beyond Biggie, but it’s still a song about the loss of Biggie. You could argue that the success of “I’ll Be Missing You” reflected people’s sadness and shock over Biggie’s murder, though the song had lots of other stuff going on, too. It’s a true mark of a titan: This guy was still making hits months after his body was cremated. Biggie is the only artist in history who’s done it more than once. In the entire history of the Hot 100, only a few artists have topped the chart posthumously. Biggie was only alive for two months in 1997, but he towered over the entire pop-music landscape for the entire year. In between those two chart-toppers, Biggie’s label boss Puff Daddy held down the #1 spot for 11 long weeks with his Biggie tribute “ I’ll Be Missing You.” That year, Bad Boy’s iron grip on the pop charts was both terrifying and awe-inspiring, and most of its hits were directly catalyzed by Biggie’s death. Both that song and “ Hypnotize,” Biggie’s previous chart-topper, reached #1 after Biggie’s murder.
“Mo Money Mo Problems” was Biggie Smalls’ second #1 hit. (Will Smith will appear in this column pretty soon.) At the end of the film, we learn that the elevated discs of the New York State Pavilion are really disguised flying saucers, and a bug-monster guy tries to use them to escape Earth.
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There was, for instance, Men In Black, the blockbuster that turned once-and-future rapper Will Smith into the biggest movie star in the world. In the summer of 1997, those World’s Fair constructions, still standing in Flushing Meadows, appeared in two of the the summer’s great escapist entertainment spectacles. Those buildings soon became part of New York’s kitschy iconography, but kitsch has its own power, too. When the World’s Fair came to Queens in 1964, the shiny, chromed-out architecture on display was supposed to represent the dawn of the Space Age - a new global era when humanity was reaching beyond what was possible and jumping optimistically into the future. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.