Life After Death was the ironically posthumous album after Big was killed in 1997. One huge feature would have made it even bigger if he had got on it…that person being Prince.
At the time Prince had been very critical of rap, especially during this time during the whole “bitch” and “hoe” controversy. Puff details below Prince ultimately choosing to not get on the record:
“We met with Prince,” Diddy explained. “We did the thing (‘This Time Around’) with Michael Jackson, and me and [Big] was always Prince fans and stuff like that. But this was during a time when Prince wasn’t really rocking with hip-hop and wasn’t really clearing any samples, so that really didn’t go too well. But we was always still cool with him and wound up sampling some of his records and he wound up not chasing me for them in the future.”
“He would just go through his phases and he came back to us and just let us know how proud he was of us and the whole thing,” Diddy continued. “He was just really protective at one time of just what was going on as far as the whole ‘bitch’ and ‘hoe’ controversy. That was a real moment in hip-hop. That was a real reflection point in hip-hop where we were being kind of asked to take responsibility and really think about what we were saying.”
