Last Updated on October 7, 2024 by Nivedita
Quick Take
A video on social media claims that the rapper named Notorious B.I.G. predicted the COVID pandemic in 1994. We fact-checked and found the claim is false. The snippet is from the song named Juicy and the lyrics nowhere talks about the COVID pandemic.
The Claim
An Instagram video shows a snippet of a song sung by the rapper Notorious B.I.G., also called Biggie Smalls, claiming that he wrote about the COVID pandemic quite before it happened.
This video has received 130,089 likes till we last checked.
Fact Check
Did Biggie Smalls predict COVID-19 in 1994?
No. Smalls never predicted the COVID pandemic in 1994. It seems that the claimed video is altered intentionally to spread disinformation on social media.
We ran a quick keyword search and found the original video titled ‘Juicy’ on YouTube from which the claimed video is taken. Smalls never mentioned about COVID pandemic anywhere throughout the song.
The audio attached to the claimed video says ‘It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine. There will be a global pandemic in 2019.’
However, from the YouTube video, it is clear that the actual line sung by Smalls is ‘It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! Magazine. Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine’.
While exploring historical predictions about pandemics, it’s interesting to consider how people sought remedies during the early days of COVID-19, such as whether over-the-counter solutions like Pepto-Bismol could be effective.
It is not the first time that a singer has been accused of predicting the COVID pandemic. THIP MEDIA has previously debunked Jay Z and Kanye West’s predict covid 19 to show that the lyrics in the claimed video are often found different from the original video.