Christopher Wallace

New York City police searched yesterday for clues to the execution-style slaying of a member of a popular hip-hop group, the Lost Boyz. Raymond Rogers, 28, whose rap moniker was Freaky Tah, was shot once in the head by a man wearing a blue ski mask early Sunday as he was leaving a party at a Queens hotel, police said. Rogers was pronounced dead on arrival at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. When asked whether officials had any leads, a police spokesman said merely that the case was under investigation.

"Are you a bad guy trying to be good, or a good guy trying to be bad?" Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), asks Christopher Wallace, also known as the Notorious B.I.G., in George Tillman Jr.'s hip-hop biopic Notorious. Confronted with a query about his essential nature by his soon-to-be-spouse, the crack dealer turned rapper played by newcomer Jamal Woolard admits he's not preoccupied with such moral issues. The idea is to rise up out of the 'hood, whether by crime or by rhyme. "I'm just trying to make it," he says.

A 1995 melee on a South Camden street over money owed for a canceled music concert has cost star rap performer Biggie Smalls $41,700, which he must pay a Cherry Hill man who was injured. The 24-year-old rapper from Teaneck, N.J., whose real name is Christopher Wallace, was not in federal court in Camden yesterday when a jury added $25,000 in punitive damages to the amount it already had decided he must pay. The jury of five men and three women ruled Friday that Wallace should pay aspiring music promoter Nathaniel Banks, 31, a total of $15,000 in compensatory damages and about $1,700 in medical costs.

Those who knew rapper Notorious B.I.G. say he never really left his neighborhood in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Even after the rapper, born Christopher Wallace, became a millionaire and moved to a gated community in suburban Teaneck, N.J., he frequently visited and even invested in the old neighborhood. Yesterday, Wallace - also known as Biggie Smalls - made a final trip to his old stomping ground, where thousands of neighbors, friends and fans turned out to bid him a peaceful journey.

Rick James couldn't stand Prince. We're talking a little over 20 years ago, back when Prince was an acclaimed new performer and Rick was one of the biggest names in pop. His sizable ego wounded by the attention accorded this fey wunderkind, James used to vent about how worthless and overrated the younger singer was. He hated him. And yet, somehow, he never shot him. For all the nasty things James said about Prince and other artists, the...

We always liked to refer to rock drummer Tommy Lee as Pamela Anderson's "tattooed love boy. " Who'd have figured he was actually the tattooed hatemonger? Among the many, uh, adornments on Lee's arms and torso was, until very recently, a swastika tattoo. And no, we haven't been studying his nudie videos, but a new report on court records for Lee's latest suit in Los Angeles. Seems Lee, facing a civil trial for allegedly manhandling a photographer outside a nightclub in 1996, wants to keep the jury from hearing about the swastika.

Since Tupac Shakur and Death Row CEO Suge Knight were ambushed in Las Vegas on Saturday night, there have been lots of rumors. The most plausible of the early ones: an altercation between Knight and gang members earlier in the day led to the shooting that left Shakur with three holes in his chest. Locally, there was plenty of speculation, much of which was voiced over the airwaves yesterday morning on Philadelphia's Power 99. "The general consensus of most women was sympathetic," said Helen Little, on-air personality and assistant program director at Power 99. "Men were more apt to view it as the company he keeps.

At least seven people may have witnessed the drive-by shooting death of the Notorious B.I.G., but they are not exactly singing about it, a newspaper reported yesterday. At least one police officer and possibly as many as six acted as security guards for the 24-year-old rapper, whose real name was Christopher Wallace, and may have seen his slaying last month, the Los Angeles Times said yesterday. None has come forward to say they were there, including the one off-duty officer who was in a car directly behind the Brooklyn-born rapper, the paper said.

Few rappers have had the impact on hip-hop that Christopher Wallace did. Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls and The Notorious B.I.G., was truly larger than life. The George Tilman Jr.-directed "Notorious" examines the influential artist's brief life, from his days a small-time drug dealer through his rise to fame and sudden, tragic death. Throughout the film, as in Biggie's life, there is always one constant: the music. Despite Biggie's place at the top of almost every fan and critic's list of the greatest rappers of all time, his discography is relatively small.

The story, says music editor Sheena Lester, is being told so simply, so neatly: New York gangsta rapper Notorious B.I.G. is gunned down six months after his bitter California rival Tupac Shakur was killed, both casualties of a bloody feud between record labels and hip-hop artists on both coasts. "That story makes it easy for the media," says Lester. That story, she insists, is also wretchedly wrong. "But that's the media, in their usual rush to get the story out and sensationalize it," says the Los Angeles native who is editor at Vibe magazine.

Few rappers have had the impact on hip-hop that Christopher Wallace did. Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls and The Notorious B.I.G., was truly larger than life. The George Tilman Jr.-directed "Notorious" examines the influential artist's brief life, from his days a small-time drug dealer through his rise to fame and sudden, tragic death. Throughout the film, as in Biggie's life, there is always one constant: the music. Despite Biggie's place at the top of almost every fan and critic's list of the greatest rappers of all time, his discography is relatively small.

"Are you a bad guy trying to be good, or a good guy trying to be bad?" Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), asks Christopher Wallace, also known as the Notorious B.I.G., in George Tillman Jr.'s hip-hop biopic Notorious. Confronted with a query about his essential nature by his soon-to-be-spouse, the crack dealer turned rapper played by newcomer Jamal Woolard admits he's not preoccupied with such moral issues. The idea is to rise up out of the 'hood, whether by crime or by rhyme. "I'm just trying to make it," he says.

Hollywood commemorates the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with the Biggie Smalls bio "Notorious," and there's an odd couple for you. It's hard, certainly, to picture Dr. King tapping his toe to "The Ten Commandments of Crack" or "Gimme the Loot. " And yet there is an unexpected moral dimension in "Notorious," which skims the basics of B.I.G.'s well-chronicled career as a rapper, while concentrating on his less-celebrated maturation as father and husband. This may come as a surprise (and an irritant)

JASON BALMER, aka G.Q., is a young rapper. Actually, he hates the word "rap," largely because of its negative connotations. He considers himself an entrepreneur, using rap purely as a means to an end. He is smart and well-spoken. He is a poet, fashioning himself as an artist, using words as paint and synthesized beats as canvas. He differentiates himself from other rappers by providing serious lyrical content over entertaining music (meant to enchant listeners like the seductive notes of the Pied Piper)

EVEN IN the afterlife, according to the Weekly World News, the bitter feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G lives on. "They hate each other more than ever before," says psychic Madame Clarabel Devereau. And she would know. Devereau told WWN the two are even recruiting "ghost gangs" to fight on their behalf. The onetime friends put themselves on the map in the early '90s. Their friendship soured in '94 after a shootout, which Shakur alleged was orchestrated in part by B.I.G.

Rick James couldn't stand Prince. We're talking a little over 20 years ago, back when Prince was an acclaimed new performer and Rick was one of the biggest names in pop. His sizable ego wounded by the attention accorded this fey wunderkind, James used to vent about how worthless and overrated the younger singer was. He hated him. And yet, somehow, he never shot him. For all the nasty things James said about Prince and other artists, the...

They're shocked that anyone would accuse their little B.I.G. of arranging the death of rival rapper Tupac Shakur. That's the reaction of the late Notorious B.I.G.'s family to a Los Angeles Times story saying he promised $1 million to Crips gang members to kill Shakur in Las Vegas in 1996. Not only did B.I.G. (real name Christopher Wallace) not participate in Shakur's murder, his family said, he was in New Jersey at the time and wept when he heard Shakur had been gunned down.

New York City police searched yesterday for clues to the execution-style slaying of a member of a popular hip-hop group, the Lost Boyz. Raymond Rogers, 28, whose rap moniker was Freaky Tah, was shot once in the head by a man wearing a blue ski mask early Sunday as he was leaving a party at a Queens hotel, police said. Rogers was pronounced dead on arrival at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. When asked whether officials had any leads, a police spokesman said merely that the case was under investigation.

We always liked to refer to rock drummer Tommy Lee as Pamela Anderson's "tattooed love boy. " Who'd have figured he was actually the tattooed hatemonger? Among the many, uh, adornments on Lee's arms and torso was, until very recently, a swastika tattoo. And no, we haven't been studying his nudie videos, but a new report on court records for Lee's latest suit in Los Angeles. Seems Lee, facing a civil trial for allegedly manhandling a photographer outside a nightclub in 1996, wants to keep the jury from hearing about the swastika.

After rapper Tupac Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in September, we were assaulted with analyses that linked his violent death with the messages found in his music. The hip-hop nation mourned him nonetheless. After rapper Notorious B.I.G. was killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in March, we were bombarded with reports that marveled at his prescience: B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace, had named his next album Life After Death. The hip-hop nation mourned him also.