Pitchfork: The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 20-01

Actually, yeah, by the time you were in college, people probably used iTunes at parties anyway.

not saying "juicy" wasn't a hit to start with because it obviously was but I think maybe there was just a lag before it became like "the" notorious big song. I don't remember hearing it at college frat parties either.

I always thought his biggest song pre-1997 was "Big Poppa."

― billstevejim, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 2:39 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

As it occurred, yes. But in retrospect, "Juicy" definitely got more of a legacy. Lots o ppl who weren't payin attention in 1994 posting in this thread imo

I'm 31 and I heard "hypnotize" and "big poppa" way before I heard "juicy,"

A couple of years older over here, but I had the same experience. I didn't really become a Biggie fan until a buddy made a C-90 of stuff from RTD and LAD, along with selections from Wu solo albums (great tape too).

"Unavoidable super-hit" "Juicy" peaked at #72; "Big Poppa" hit #6. It def became a classic in retrospect.

iirc and it turns our i do rc

Also, no frats at my school. Most of the big parties I went to in college were hosted by art/theatre kids.

In most cases people just stand around drinking beer and talking

you make parties sound so much fun!

as deej says, it's...all parties, really. house parties, friends' club nights, all of them. i've probably heard "juicy" at the majority of parties i've ever been to.

I'm struggling to think of anyone I was friends with in college who would've had a Notorious B.I.G. album

or maybe this just wasn't true of us. it's not exactly weird to know or have known people who own biggie albums, surely?

lex how old are you?

I also wasn't familiar with Juicy until very recently. Hypnotize was everywhere on the radio in LA when it was released and at college parties in the early-mid '00s. Maybe among a certain set of people it's legendary but definitely not the most recognizable or famous BIG song...in my experience at least.

28

i mean, i'd say "mo money mo problems" and "hypnotize" are as iconic as "juicy" too

"Unavoidable super-hit" "Juicy" peaked at #72; "Big Poppa" hit #6. It def became a classic in retrospect.

why is whiney using the UK chart positions?!

oh wait it was "mo money" that hit no 6 here, "big poppa" got to no 63

weird that "juicy" had a no 72 peak in both UK and US

"Juicy" isn't iconic or his biggest hit, it's just his signature song, the lead single from his classic first, the one that sums him up better than any other song. it'd be a good example of songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller but it's #2 on iTunes behind "Hypnotize" (#3 and #4 are "Mo Money" and "Big Poppa")

his classic first album, i meant to say

some dude otm

count me down as another one: the real-time Biggie songs I knew were "Big Poppa" & "Hypnotize" & I didn't become aware of "Juicy" until, like, last week. I may have heard it but it never registered.

I wz in a frat, but the music that we played at parties were usually like "Ass n' Titties", "Ms. Jackson", and maritime shanties. And the Dead.

I knew "Juicy", but it wasn't as ubiquitous as "Hypnotize" or "Mo Money" at the time.

So wait, are we saying more people on ILX are familiar with "Gold Soundz" than "Juicy" because

It's possible I may have heard GS more than Juicy irl...

Time for another poll, whiney?

(btw its crazy how p4k could number the ticks burrowed in their collective epidermises & it wd still create huge ripples in ilx...)

This "Juicy" conversation is enlightening! The only radio station I was listening to at the time was Boston's R&B/hip-hop station, so I heard "Juicy" a LOT. I assume anyone else who was also listening to hip-hop/R&B stations knew it at the time as well; considering the strong indie/alternative slant of ILM, plus the demographic beginning to skew younger, it's not that surprising that many people here wouldn't be familiar with the song until much later.

actually, (btw its crazy how p4k could number the ticks burrowed in their collective epidermises & it wd still create huge ripples in ilx...) it's nto that crazy, it does make some sense.

xp to Dan...yeah there were no real hiphop stations where I lived in 1994, in fact iirc I wasn't even allowed to watch MTV back then...three rock stations though, so I was well aware of alt-indie stuff.

it's not exactly weird to know or have known people who own biggie albums, surely?

No, not at all! But surely the opposite isn't that strange, either? I don't disagree that "Juicy" is an iconic song for lots of people; my only point is that it's not "impossible" for me to never have heard it before 2006 when that kind of thing wasn't really on my radar screen at all.

this seems like one of those weird things where people had different experiences from one another

oddly enough ime in 1994 "juicy" was then the national anthem of the small central asian republic where i was living but wasnt regularly played on the one hip hop/rnb station there. perhaps because doing so would require anyone listening to stand at attention for the duration. the biggest radio jam at the time was bone thugs n-harmony's seminal thuggish ruggish bone...

I really don't know if this is the time to challenge deej's assertion:

i dont think theres a high school student in america who doesnt know who [gucci mane] is.

― *sets trend* (deej), Sunday, September 12, 2010 8:09 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahahahahaha

apparently deej didn't know any super-Christians growing up

iirc there was a year or so in 94-95 that was the only time in the '90s that my family didn't have cable, and the lack of MTV kind of left me with some weird blind spots where I kind of totally missed a few big songs/artists I would've otherwise known from that period. Biggie's first album was one of them, I think my first exposure to a Biggie song was when David Spade went "I love it when you call me big poppa" on SNL. so i didn't even hear a lot of Biggie until he died (whereas 2Pac had been big earlier than '94 so I knew all his big singles).

iirc there was a year or so in 94-95 that was the only time in the '90s that my family didn't have cable

Haha I've literally never had cable.

doesn't this basically boil down to the divide between "hip-hop" and "mainstream" music/radio being much more strongly in place in '94? feels like that wall didn't really start to come down until the post-"Fantasy (Remix)", Bad Boy Entertainment, east-coast-vs.-west-coast era was in full effect (at least this is how rap (beyond MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice) first started to penetrate my sheltered suburban consciousness)

i don't know, i mean snoop, dre, 2pac and wu were pretty huge at my high school (i'm 31). not so much biggie til college, "hypnotize"

yeah but bernard is right in that if you lived out in the sticks, like i did at the time, then you might not have lived within listening range of an all-rap station, and the pop or R&B station might have played as little rap as possible, which is why not having MTV for a few months dropped me pretty well out of touch with hip hop for a while

in the uk 'hypnotize' and (more so) 'mo money mo problems' ('featuring the puff daddy' as it says on my cd) were crossover chart hits. we didn't have as many radio stations, or as much diversity, or anything like as much cable tv. so 'juicy' came and went and was probably heard by rap heads but not by anyone else. (similarly 'california love' was tupac's first hit here. apart from method's collab with mjb i doubt wu-tang had a hit, collectively or individually, till 'gravel pit'.) 'juicy' does seem to be a thing among people who are actively interested in rap music/hipsters/______ but otherwise no.

fwiw went to a lol 90s 'hipster' dance party a coupla weeks ago & the biggie song that had the most ppl (median age like 22) 'rapping' along was "dead wrong"

i dont think this proves anything but yknow

'juicy' was the 1st biggie song i heard, watched the video on the box, stuck w/ me in a way big poppa didnt, everyone at my jr. high & high school knew it, not sure what else to tell u except what max said

idk i think im saying imo its kind of weird to not know anyone who had a biggie cd in college?? am i crazy

i mean ive said before in chicago biggie wasnt nearly as big as bone thugs or tupac around the same time, but juicy & big poppa def had their time

i get the feeling that deej went to a way less diverse high school than me when he gets on the "everyone in my high school" kick.

my only point is that it's not "impossible" for me to never have heard it before 2006 when that kind of thing wasn't really on my radar screen at all

i mean...yeah, i guess i don't find it surprising that eg my mother has never heard "juicy", what with that kind of thing not being on her radar. or if you were in prison for the second half of the 90s and first half of the 00s, it wouldn't be impossible for it to have bypassed you in that case either.

i just find it really surprising that someone with an interest in popular music could have made it through their late teens and early twenties, and the parties in that period, without having heard it - not even played, maybe, but talked about, referenced. or that thing where you realise that biggie is a big deal and you might want to quietly check out some of his biggest hits.

i get the feeling that deej went to a way less diverse high school than me when he gets on the "everyone in my high school" kick.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 12:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my h.s. was fairly diverse but, like, black pop music was basically the sound & texture of popular culture at the time. white kids all knew the lyrics to biggie songs. the basketball pep band used to cover 'are you that somebody' like a year after it came out

Did Usher DJ your prom and teach you all a routine for "The Rockafeller Skank"?

lol

i just find it really surprising that someone with an interest in popular music could have made it through their late teens and early twenties, and the parties in that period, without having heard it - not even played, maybe, but talked about, referenced. or that thing where you realise that biggie is a big deal and you might want to quietly check out some of his biggest hits.

By the time Biggie became a big deal, I wasn't really interested in "popular music" per se. Late high school and college for me was all about burrowing further into indie rock, post-rock, IDM, and the like. I did manage to hear some pop/hip-hop songs here and there -- e.g, Eminem seemed very inescapable right around the time I graduated from college (2000). Friends of mine who weren't normally into hip-hop bought The Marshall Mathers LP, and "The Real Slim Shady" was played on the Chicago alt-rock station, which I still occasionally listened to when I was home from school. But that was an exception.

When I finally came up for air in 2003, I did go back and discover some stuff I'd missed out on, like Missy Elliott and Aaliyah and OutKast. But for whatever reason, I never thought to check out Biggie. Tbh, I only downloaded Ready to Die after watching The Wackness (lol) two years ago.

deejer,

I mean, I would say that black pop/rap was definitely the DOMINANT dialogue in my HS. But there was also a huge Green Day/Sublime/Metallica contingent that wouldn't touch the stuff as well as an equally huge contingent of like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbH60wCO-Yw

Ha, I just remembered how when The Marshall Mathers LP came out, I felt frustrated b/c I found Em very fascinating and wanted to write an essay on him as a ~cultural phenomenon~ but felt like I lacked any kind of immediate context for his music, since I was too busy listening to Mouse on Mars or Jim O'Rourke or whatever.