Big Pun ft. The O'Jays - I'm Not A Player (Uncut)
From 1998 Album: "Capital Punishment".....
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Christopher Rios (November 9, 1971 - February 7, 2000) R.I.P., better known by his stage name as Big Pun (short for Big Punisher), was a Puerto Rican-American rapper who emerged from the underground rap scene in The Bronx in the late 1990s. He first appeared on albums from The Beatnuts, on the track "Off the Books", and on Fat Joe's second album Jealous One's Envy, on the track "Watch Out", prior to signing to Loud Records as a solo artist. Big Pun's career was cut short in 2000 at age 28 when he died of a fatal heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Liza Rios, and three children.
He grew up in a Puerto Rican community in New York City's South Bronx neighborhood. By all accounts from Rios's family, his early years were very difficult, including witnessing his mother's drug abuse, his father leaving the family, and a stepfather who was very hard on Rios. According to his grandmother, Rios would become angry and self-destructive, punching holes in the walls of his family's apartment and eating pieces of broken drywall. Rios dropped out of high school and for some time was homeless staying in abandoned buildings or at friends' homes
Sometime during the 1980s, he formed the Full a Clips Crew with Triple Seis (rapper), Prospect and Cuban Link who was at the time named "Lyrical Assassin". At this point Big Pun was operating under the alias Big Moon Dawg. Rios met fellow Puerto Rican and Bronx rapper Fat Joe in 1995 and made his commercial debut on Joe's second album, Jealous Ones Envy, in addition to appearing on a b-side to Joe's "Envy" single, "Fire Water" and "Watch Out."
Later, "I'm Not a Player" (featuring an O'Jays sample) was supported by a significant advertising campaign and became an underground hit. The song's remix, "Still Not a Player" (featuring Joe) produced by Knobody, became Big Pun's first major mainstream hit. His full-length debut Capital Punishment followed in 1998, and was the first album by a solo Latino rapper to go platinum, peaking at #5 on the Billboard 200. Capital Punishment was also nominated for a Grammy, but lost out on the award to Jay-Z's Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life. He became a member of Terror Squad, a New York-based group of rappers founded by Fat Joe, with most of the roster supplied by the now-defunct Full a Clips Crew who released their debut album The Album in 1999. In 1999 he co-starred in the Albert Pyun-directed ghetto-movie Urban Menace, alongside his frequent collaborator Fat Joe.
Also Big Pun had a small role in the 1996 film High School High which starred Jon Lovitz.
Excluding his adolescence, Big Pun struggled with his weight for most of his life; his weight fluctuated in the early 1990s between obese and morbidly obese. Big Pun enrolled in a weight-loss program in North Carolina, in which he lost 80 pounds, but he eventually quit the program before completing it, returning to New York and gaining back the weight he had lost. On February 7, 2000, Big Pun suffered a fatal heart attack and respiratory failure while temporarily staying with family at a Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains, New York during a home renovation. Pun was pronounced dead at the hospital after paramedics could not revive him. He reportedly weighed 698lbs at the time of his death.
A new tribute documentary Big Pun: The Legacy is currently in post-production. The film will contain multiple interviews with artists, actors, close friends and others whose lives were touched by Big Pun, as well as rare exclusive performances and scene interviews with Big Pun himself. The film will feature appearances by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Snoop Dogg, DMX, Method Man, U-God, Liza Rios, Xzibit, Cuban Link, Swizz Beatz, DJ Skribble and many more. Film is directed by Vlad Yudin. The documentary will come out September 15, 2009. It is distributed through Vivendi Universal and The Soundtrack is released through Legacy/Columbia Records, Sony Music. Footage from the documentary included Prodigy, of Mobb Deep, saying that Big Pun, "ordered like all the entrees and all the appetizers." He stated that Big Pun had become out of control to the point where when Prodigy, Pun, and Fat Joe would be in the studio and Joe left for a few minutes, he "would order two buckets of KFC, like two, three buckets and try to eat them before (Fat) Joe came."
Extended & updated info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pun
