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Much like the first time he heard Ice Cube on KDAY, Bivins is impressed with Biggie’s lyrics. In Juicy, Biggie relates his dreams of moving out of the New York City housing projects:

Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool
Considered a fool ’cause I dropped out of high school
Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood
And it’s still all good
… We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us
No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us.

It’s up to Bivins to turn Biggie into a West Coast sensation, but it won’t be easy. Not only is Biggie unknown outside New York, but Bivins is trying to break him into the market amid a rivalry between West Coast and East Coast rappers. It sounds senseless that musicians from different coasts would take issue with each other based on geography, but remember that many rappers grew up amid poverty and gang violence. Surviving meant fierce neighborhood loyalty.

Bivins isn’t intimidated. He organizes a two-week promotional tour of the West Coast for Biggie, complete with club performances, lunches with record-store owners, radio interviews, and appearances at skate parks and community centers. At one of those mid-tour afternoon jaunts, a crowd of teenagers eagerly awaits meeting Biggie, but the rapper is holed up inside his van, uneasy about glorifying guns and violence to high-school kids.

“I’m not a role-model, man,” he tells Bivins. “My music is not role-model music.”

“Well …, tell them about what to avoid,” says Bivins.

“OK …, I can do that,” Biggie replies, and he exits the van.

The tour’s days are long—often starting as early as 7 am, when Bivins picks Biggie up at his hotel, and sometimes lasting until nearly dawn when Bivins drops him off. Soon, Juicy becomes as hot in Los Angeles as it was in New York. The album, Ready to Die, receives widespread critical acclaim, gets several Grammy nominations, and achieves quadruple-platinum status (over four million sales). After years of West Coast rap dominance, Biggie has almost single-handedly swung the hip-hop pendulum back to the East Coast.

One night, before an LA concert, Biggie invites Bivins into his trailer. In front of several close friends, the rapper proclaims, “Anybody who said that they broke my record on the West Coast is lying. This is the guy who did it,” he says of Bivins. “You told me it was gonna break. … Thank you.”

With Biggie’s success, Bivins captures the attention of the country’s biggest music labels. He’s soon hired as the West Coast promotions manager for Jive Records, where he promotes some of the most popular urban music artists—among them R. Kelly, KRS-One, and Aaliyah. During Bivins’ tenure, he helps sell nearly 20 million albums.

By 1996, the coastal rap rivalry has escalated, particularly between Biggie and West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur. The bravado and raw emotions of their lyrics turn personal—and public—as the rappers battle each other through their lyrics. In one song, Shakur insinuates that he slept with Biggie’s estranged wife, and when Shakur is shot dead in Las Vegas in late 1996, rumors swirl of Biggie’s involvement.

Just months later, Bivins is named Jive Records’ southeast regional urban music promoter, a position based in Atlanta, Ga. As Bivins arrives in Atlanta after a 2,000-mile drive, his cell phone rings: Biggie, the man Bivins helped launch to superstardom, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. “I really don’t know why it came to that,” Bivins says. “I knew that it was dangerous because I could see it … but I never thought it would come to murder.” Both crimes remain unsolved.

A few years and several top 10 songs and multi-platinum albums later, Bivins is one of the country’s most powerful promoters of urban music; in the early 2000s, Capitol Records—not considered a major player in urban music—hires him to help overhaul its rap and R&B reputation. He works quickly, launching an unknown rapper named “Chingy” and his debut album, Jackpot, to triple-platinum status. In 2004, Capitol releases Chingy’s sophomore album, Powerballin, and awaits a tidal wave of revenue.

It never arrives. Powerballin sells only 40,000 copies its first week, compared to Jackpot’s 300,000 first-week sales. Bivins is stunned. Powerballin’s debut single has an audience of more than 150 million. What happened? Internet piracy happened. By 2004, Chingy fans—along with millions of music lovers across the country—realized that instead of shelling out nearly $20 for a CD, they could download it for free. Music labels begin losing billions of dollars. Lawsuits against piracy sites abound, staffs are laid off, and the entire business appears on the verge of collapse. Bivins may need to find a new career.

But relief soon arrives. The Web-based store iTunes, launched in spring 2003, starts to take off. By July 2005, it has sold 500 million songs. Additionally, the industry’s lawsuits gain traction in the courts, shutting down the most popular piracy sites.

Along with iTunes, the Internet’s emergence ushers in more good news for Bivins. It gives him the ability to accurately track music sales, radio plays, online video hits, even what songs are playing nationwide in real time. He starts receiving dozens of reports daily on his portfolio of songs. “Nowadays, you can’t just be the guy who can talk the fastest and be the slickest. You’ve got to also be the guy who can sort through the information.”

Because of the data-analysis skills he acquired at Carnegie Mellon, he says, he was well positioned to adapt to the new promotions model: “The Internet was our worst enemy. Now it’s our best friend. It’s the new street.”

Urban music is now a titan in American—and global—culture. Many of its stars have become entrepreneurial moguls, dipping their hands into everything from clothing lines and footwear to restaurants and sports teams. “Hip-hop is everybody now. Kids these days grew up on rap. Commercials include rap. Movies include rap,” Bivins says. “Everything is about hip-hop. It’s music—but it’s also a lifestyle.”

In his latest role at RCA, Bivins has a roster that includes artists like Alicia Keys, Usher, R. Kelly, and Pitbull, who together have won more than a dozen Grammies and sold more than 200 million albums. Urban music and culture will be big business for the foreseeable future—in 2011 alone, it generated nearly $10 billion—which means artists like ASAP Rocky can have quite a payday if they make it. Right now, though, he’s just another young dreamer counting on Bivins to get his music played.

Nicholas Ducassi (A’10) of New York City is an actor, writer, and filmmaker and has been a regular contributor to this magazine since his senior year.

Images by Donnelly Marks (A'80)

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