Sotheby’s to Auction Love Letters and Crown from Tupac and Rapper Biggie

NEW YORK, KOMPAS.com – Sotheby’s will auction off teenage Tupac’s love letters and rapper Biggie’s iconic crown next month in their first-ever sale devoted to hip hop.

More than 120 lots will be featured in the September 15 sale including clothing, jewelry, art, and other ephemera of the hip hope genre born in the Bronx.

Love letters from Tupac and the crown from rapper Biggie will be the headline of next month’s sale. 

The crown is the headgear that The Notorious B.I.G. — famous for hits including "Juicy", "Big Poppa" and "Hypnotize" — wore during his last recorded photoshoot in 1997, just three days before his shock murder in Los Angeles.

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The photographer Barron Claiborne, who took the now immortal image of the artist born Christopher Wallace, put the rap artifact up for sale where it's expected to go for $200,000 to $300,000.

It's quite a sum for a crown made of plastic that Sean "Diddy" Combs, at the time Biggie's label owner, at first worried would make the hip hop superstar look like the Burger King rather than the King of New York.

"You're not so much selling the object as selling the story that's behind it," explained Cassandra Hatton, the senior specialist at Sotheby's behind the auction set to become an annual event.

"It's something that we all recognize. All you have to say is 'Biggie's Crown,'" she told AFP.

"Even my grandma — and I love Grandma, but she's not hip," laughed Hatton. "She knew what Biggie's crown was."

Tupac in love

The other cornerstone of the September auction is a collection of 22 signed love letters penned by Tupac Shakur to his girlfriend Kathy Loy when he was a teenager in Baltimore.

Tupac — whose hits included "California", "Changes", "Dear Mama" and "All Eyez On Me" — was also gunned down, just months before Biggie.

Both murders of two of hip hop's most influential stars remain unsolved.

The 42 pages of intimate messages written in the deliberate yet shaky cursive of an adolescent paint a vulnerable portrait of the lyrical Tupac in love, both eager to profess his heart's desire and insecurity that he could lose his high school sweetheart.