Krayzie Bone has weighed in on the back-and-forth surrounding the history of his group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony‘s famous collaboration with Biggie, and he admits that one member of the crew did initially have an issue with doing the song due to his relationship with 2Pac.
Krayzie sat down with The Art of Dialogue for an interview published on Thursday (January 25). In it, he was asked about Fat Joe’s comments to Angie Martinez last year that the group was originally reticent to do the song “Notorious Thugs” because they were “cool” with 2Pac, but that he convinced them to go ahead.
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Group member Layzie Bone remembered things differently in an interview earlier this month, but Krayzie mostly backed up Joe’s version of events.
According to Krayzie, most of the group was excited about the prospect of the collaboration, but one member, Bizzy Bone, did object to it at first out of loyalty to ‘Pac.
“I never had any reluctancy of doing a song with Big or ‘Pac,” Krayzie said. “I think Bizzy felt some kind of way about doing the Biggie song because we had done the 2Pac song [“Thug Luv”]. And I think Fat Joe did convince Bizzy, you need to go ahead and get on the song. Fat Joe did do that.”
Krayzie also remembered worrying about the tense climate between the East and West coasts at the time of “Notorious Thugs,” which was released via Biggie’s posthumous album Life After Death just weeks after his murder in March 1997.
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“Of course I thought about it: are we gonna get caught up in this beef?” he recalled. “But it was like, look, we making music right now. We not part of this. We doing music. We love ‘Pac, we love Big. We gonna do music with both of them. And it worked out well for us.”
Layzie Bone, as mentioned, had a different recollection of events. He told The Art of Dialogue: “[W]e was like, hell yeah, right off the gate…Let me clear up that one rumor that said we turned down Biggie Smalls. Man, we had never turned down Biggie Smalls.”
In the same interview, Layzie also recounted the time Biggie diffused a brawl between Bone Thugs and Wu-Tang Clan at a Def Jam Christmas party in 1996.
“Something happened, Wu-Tang came in, one member or another member had some — it had nothing to do with the main characters; it was our up-and-coming artists and people that were around, our entourage,” he said.
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“So pushing and shoving started, bottles get to throwing, a fight broke out. When [Bone Thugs’ “Everyday Thang 2” came on at the party] all hell broke loose. And then we had to get up out of there.”
He continued: “Thank God, rest in peace to Chris Lighty and his brother Dave Lighty got us out the party. Coming out the party, we was finna get rushed. Now, we just went to breakfast with Wu-Tang Clan that morning so we didn’t understand the confusion.
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“So Meth was like, ‘Ya’ll gonna get up outta here.’ But it was n-ggas coming with them thangs, though. It was finna go there and that’s when Biggie showed up. He kinda cleared the path for us to get outta there. That’s a long story short. Way more shit happened than that.”
