Styles P has revealed the late Notorious B.I.G. wanted to squash the beef between The LOX and Diddy before he was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1997.
During his interview with The Art of Dialogue, Styles reflected on the night Biggie was killed in Los Angeles, California, and how badly he wanted the two parties to bury their hatchet. According to the Yonkers native, Big was guiding the trio on how to handle the situation with Diddy that eventually spilled over in the early 2000s.
“We literally had just left — we was going somewhere else, and then, just heard it was shots,” he said. “That was just really fuckin’ crazy, like, you know what I’m sayin’? And we were just finished talkin’ to him about — we was having some kind of rift with Puff, and he was basically kind of just, like, trying to guide us through it … telling us, chill out, you know? He’s gonna hold it down when he get back.”
He continued: “That shit was devastating. That was our big bro. He was really cool. That’s why we made ‘We’ll Always Love Big Poppa.’ We held him in a very high regard.”
The rift between The LOX and Diddy deepened after Big died and the group was fed up with the trajectory of their careers under Bad Boy Records. In the late 90s, The LOX kicked off the “Free The LOX” campaign that demanded Diddy release them from their contracts in order to find a label more fitting of their hardcore, street sound.
Things got so bad between both sides that Styles P hurled a chair at Diddy in an argument at the Bad Boy offices. During an interview with HipHopDX in 2020, Styles admitted the moment wasn’t a smart idea.
“The moment with tossing the chair at Puff was a combination of being really fucking stupid and really fucking angry,” he revealed. “I think for me, Big was always the barrier, and the mediator, and the middle person.”
He added: “He was always able to make things make sense to me. So I think when Big passed, it was just kind of really hard for me to deal with it and see certain things.”
Styles also revealed he and his group mates didn’t regret a thing from that tumultuous time as they stood by everything that was said.
“We don’t regret anything at all. It was like us saying you want some of this old man,” Styles P said.