Culture

“Biggie 9/11” is Twitter’s best search

Reading tweets from people who didn't Google first.

Culture

Time to get paid / Blow up like the World Trade

The Notorious B.I.G. in 1993

Culture

“Biggie 9/11” is Twitter’s best search

Reading tweets from people who didn't Google first.

Ann-Derrick Gaillot Feb—27—2018 10:38AM EST

Conspiracy theories have existed since the dawn of man, probably. But they never had a proper home until the arrival of the internet, which is also the home of the easily accessible information that disproves them all. Even so, people continue to believe in every conspiracy theory out there, even though the truth is just a quick Google away.

Case in point: the somehow enduring but easily refuted belief that the Notorious B.I.G. predicted 9/11. It all begins with Biggie’s 1994 mega-hit song “Juicy” from his debut album Ready to Die. In it, he raps the line “Time to get paid/blow up like the World Trade,” an obvious reference to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 25th anniversary of which was yesterday. Biggie’s original line was just a reference to very recent events, but one that many people nevertheless still believe was a premonition of the much larger terrorist attack on the buildings that would take place eight years later.

All across the Twitter-scape are folks who think Biggie, who was murdered in 1997, was some sort of sage whose prophetic vision is being ignored by the culture at large. Tweets saying things like “In 1994 the Notorious B.I.G. released Juicy with the lyrics ‘time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade..’ Did Biggie predict 9/11?” and “Are we going to ignore that fact that Biggie said ‘Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade.’ In Juicy in 1994, while 9/11 happened in 2001. He predicted 9/11, and no one even noticed!!! Biggie Smalls you genius motherfcker!! Love that dude” are fun to wade into on otherwise boring days. As we speak right now, someone is having their mind blown by this apparent revelation, and putting it online.

This is not a new phenomena, whatsoever. Last year, Billboard published an excellent look at how the conspiracy has proliferated, especially as some radio stations censor the offending line. And yet almost every week, there is someone who comes to this realization anew, and finds it profound enough to share with the world without doing a lick of research. It says something precious and beautiful about the human experiment — how everything old is new again, even if it’s an easily debunked theory about the ability of a dead Brooklyn rapper to predict the defining terrorist event of the modern era. We all have profound observations that we think the rest of the world is too stupid to recognize, but all it takes is typing “Biggie 9/11” into the Twitter search bar to make you realize how silly we all can look from time to time. May all of these people eventually find what they’re looking for.

Yikes

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