Super Cat Remembers “Dolly My Baby” Collab With Biggie Smalls, Sends a Message To Puffy

A Dialog With The Don Dada

Today we celebrate what would have been the 44th birthday of hip hop’s G.O.A.T., Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls. (The day is now an official holiday in Brooklyn.) One of the first big looks for the fledgling rapper came in 1993 when he got the chance to drop lyrics on Puff Daddy’s remix of “Dolly My Baby,” a single off Super Cat’s classic Don Dada album. As a youth of Jamaican descent, Biggie fully overstood what a special opportunity this was to rhyme on a record with a living legend of Jamaican dancehall culture. Sadly Biggie’s career would end four years later, but Super Cat lives on—he will perform May 30 at the Oracabessa Festival in Queens, NY. In honor of two lyrical heavyweights, we pulled this interview from the Boomshots archives. Respect in all aspect. Interview After The Jump…

You were  one of the first artists to record with Biggie Smalls.

That was a next majestic thing because I was signed to the major label and they wanted to market hip-hop with reggae, which at the same time, I didn’t have any full insight of. Still I don’t have anything against hip-hop. They are culture and I and I is roots.

So they run through a whole lot of meeting before it went on the road. And they were saying they wasn’t giving all these venues for the tour to happen and a lot of record company came together. And we went to some meeting and they are saying the venues to reggae—if reggae is not on the bill, there is not no tour going on. So they asked us how we feel about this.

We said we don’t have any problem. We see these people coming out of broken homes like some of us coming out the ghetto. They call their thing projects here, the same thing we call housing scheme in Jamaica. So we didn’t have any problem rubbing shoulder together, bringing the wheel forward and it happened there.

They were remixing reggae with hip-hop. They said it was a marketing strategy and we were at a major label. When you get a job you don’t tell the company how to market the thing to make the music sell.

So Third Eye, which was a group with Biggie Small, Jesse West, Puff Daddy, they just didn’t end up doing the remix, they end up so excited about the record—it was a number-one hit already at the four corner of the earth—they just apply their self to the work and I myself, I am not into cutting people short or cutting people out, so I just say “let it roll.” It was one of the biggest song that they ever see to the fullest time with reggae and across hip-hop. And today, Puffy is what Puffy is—great.

These days he’s got a big billboard in Times Square.

Yeah, but him need to check for some of them Jamaican youth and put some money in them pocket and sign some Jamaica youth and drop some of them million U.S. inna them pocket. ‘Cause he must remember that reggae take him off and put him in a rocket—and Dada never stop it. So Ispect it yunno.

Bless up my youth!

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