Lance "Un" Rivera recalls when The Notorious B.I.G. allegedly paid $7,500 to Mase, who was "broke" at the time, to write for Lil Cease, and returned with a handful of songs, including "Crush On You."
"Puff signed Mase, so can you imagine what kind of contract Mase got? Because B.I.G. just came off that same contract,” Rivera tells DJ Vlad at the 1:30 mark in the video above. “The LOX, all of them came off the same contracts."
Mase called out Diddy in 2020 after the Bad Boy Records founder rejected his attempt to buy back his publishing rights. Diddy allegedly paid $20,000 for his publishing, and declined a $2 million offer from Mase. "You bought it for about $20k & I offered you $2m in cash," he wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post. "This is not Black excellence at all. When our race is enslaving us. If it's about us owning, it can't be about us owning each other."
"So B.I.G. rapping with Mase on the 112 ["Only You"] remix, Mase is broke. So B.I.G. says, ‘Un, give Mase a check and he’s gonna write for Cease,'" he continued. "Mase comes back with a record called ‘Crush On You’ for Lil Cease’s album...I think we paid him $7,500 a record, he made six records. He comes back with ‘Crush On You.' It's three verses with Lil Cease on it.”
Un goes on to say that the original plan was to have Biggie as the lone feature, appearing only on the hook. Lil Kim ultimately appeared on the remix and became the version widely recognized by the masses.
“The original album that we shipped Kim wasn’t even on ‘Crush On You.’ It was all Cease for three verses and B.I.G. is doing the chorus," he explained. "A million albums without Kim and then Kim rapped on the record. She wrote her own verses and B.I.G. said, ‘Come up with an idea for the video.'”
