Nine years ago today NY hip-hop icon and rap star Biggie Smalls, the ''Notorious B. I. G.'', was murdered in a drive-by attack in Los Angeles, after a Vibe magazine party he had been attending was closed down by fire officials because of over-crowding.

At 24-years old the rap artist Christopher Wallace aka ‘Notorious B.I.G.’ was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and hip-hop culture lost another voice to senseless violence.

The murder of the NY hip-hop icon, ‘Notorious B.I.G.’, came 6 months after the murder of the west coast hip-hop rap icon Tupac Shakur (2Pac) in Las Vegas.

All the theories on the deaths of these 2 hip-hop icons have filled the news and web sites and forums since their deaths. Mostly people look at their deaths as the climax of a supposedly ‘West Coast – East Coast Beef’.

Speculation of the ‘beef’ between Marion ‘Suge’ Knights Death Row Records and Puffy’s New York based Bad Boy Records seemed to be the favorite theory for who is to blame, but the only fact is we as the hip-hop community lost two rap icons and culture icons.

The murders of these rap and hip-hop icons, Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur (2Pac) go unsolved.

R.I.P. Biggie – it’s all respect and much love to your memory.

Tupac Shakur (2Pac) and Notorious B.I.G. are a part of the history of Hip-Hop culture and their deaths are a sad commentary to the violence that seems to infiltrated the culture.