Goin’ Back to Čálli

[Intro: Biggie and Diddy]

[Dialing numbers]

[Phone Rings]

Yo!

Yo Big, wake up, wake up baby

Mmm, yo...

Yo Big, wake yo' ass up c'mon

I'm up! I'm up. I'm up, I'm up

Big, wake up!

I'm up Diddy, what the fuck, man? What's up?

C'mon now it's a quarter to six we got the 7:30 flight

Mmm, (mumbling) yeah

Yo Big, Big, Big

I'm up, yeah I hear you dog, I hear you, alright, 7:30

Yo take down this information

Ain't no pen

Tell your girl then to remember it or somethin'. Can you do that?

Aight honey, yeah write this down

Aight, uhm, flight five-oh-four

Five-oh-four

Leaving Kennedy

Kennedy

Goin' to L-A-X

Whoa. Cali?

No doubt baby, you know we gotta get this paper

Ahh, no doubt, aight

You aight?

I'm up, I'm up

Yo Big

I'm up, man

Flight five-oh-four

Alright 7:30 I'ma meet you at the airport

California

Yeah

[Phone clicks]

If you didn’t grow up in the nineties, the lines above are from the intro to Notorious. B.I.G.’s song Goin’ Back to Cali, not to be confused with L.L. Cool J’s song of the same name. 

L.L.’s song is great, but it’s also weird, as in it’s an introspective musing on whether he should move back to California, like we should all somehow be informed of the hip hop star’s bicoastal living conflicts. Cool J never does move to Cali because he’s scared of all the women in the west being too sexually aggressive (true story) - probably because he’s walking around with his shirt off.

Biggie’s song is about how he’s DTF anything that moves. This doesn’t make Biggie’s song better. It’s misogynistic, and filthy as hell even by 2023 W.A.P. standards. But, it is emblematic of a young G ruling a world that by most standards tried to reject him. A conquest like that engenders bravado many of us will never understand.