In an appearance on The Art Of Dialogue, Bad Boy Records’ former president, Kirk Burrowes, disclosed the purpose of Sean “Diddy” Combs releasing Biggie Smalls’ “Who Shot Ya.”
Despite Tupac Shakur and Smalls’ feud, Burrowes said in the interview that the song never targeted Tupac and that it was all a marketing strategy by Combs to make it seem like “Who Shot Ya” was connected to Shakur being shot to death in Quad Studios.
“The way it was marketed by the company and released, in the succession of things that were going on that we were dealing with, on all the levels that we were dealing, that record did what it was supposed to do,” Burrowes said. “That’s a perfect example of how my former business partner works and thinks. And if you could remember that three-dimensional type of thinking, then you could start to pierce through a lot of the common things that are being told and get to what’s really behind those things.”
Burrowes explained how, upon observing Combs, he understood how his mind operated. He said that Combs thought on all different levels. The first level is the “low level,” most likely implying a “one-dimensional” mindset. The higher level deals with power and principalities.
“BIggie might not have thought that when he wrote the lyrics that it was going to be used for that,” he said.
“First of all, we’re always playing chess,” Burrowes explained. “Now, if you remember a show called Star Trek, there’s such a thing as three-dimensional chess. So, now, with three-dimensional chess, you’re thinking on a few different levels. My former business partner thinks on a few different levels at one time. When you’re sleeping, he’s thinking on those different levels. So, when you get that common message, there’s two or three other messages behind that.”
The Bad Boy former president added, “It was meant to drop, it was meant to send the message it did [send], it was meant to aggravate a wound.”
