Lil’ Cease: That was a one-nighter. That was about ’Pac. He had some shyt at the beginning of that though, nobody heard it, on the reel. We had to change it. It was a little too much. I can’t remember what Big said about him, but it was terrible. It couldn’t make it. He didn’t want to do it. He had some fire. But he didn’t want to make it too much. He just wanted to address it and to let nikka know, “I know what’s going on, and I could get wreck if I want to.” Like, “If I really wanted to get on ya nikkas, I could.”
Puffy: Naaah. It was just some MC lyrics. I know people wanna have their imagination, but it was just lyrics. You’re hearing it from the horse’s mouth. I would tell the truth. If Biggie was going to do a song about 2Pac, he would have just come out with it and said his name. Their gloves were basically off. 2Pac had did “Hit ’Em Up.”
RZA: Biggie was always pretty cool with me. He liked the Wu-Tang sound. He requested me to be on the album. I didn’t know if everybody in his camp agreed with it, because at one point there was a little bit of tension in the air—with Raekwon’s [Only Built 4] Cuban Linx... album and some of the statements that was made. But we was always cool with each other.
Biggie wrote the verse after his accident. At first we had Cappadonna doing the hook, talking a lot of shyt. In the beginning, you can hear Cappadonna. Then Puff did his thing at the end. I didn’t know it was going to be there but I know how they work. I wasn’t in the studio when they did that. I went in a couple of weeks after he did the verse. They wanted to mix it themselves, but they didn’t even know where to put things at. I had so many sounds in there. They didn’t know what the fukk I was thinking about.
We had about 10 basic musical elements on that track. At the end he’s talking about everybody was fukking with them at that time. He could have even been talking about me [laughs], ’cause there was some cuts at Biggie on the Cuban Linx... album.