Today in Hip-Hop: Heavy D & the Boyz’s ‘Big Tyme’ Turns 37 — The Album That Put Uptown on the Map and Gave Pete Rock His First Credit

June 12, 1989. Uptown Records, partnered with MCA, drops Big Tyme, the sophomore album from Heavy D & the Boyz. It rides to #1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, hits #19 on the Billboard 200, and certifies Platinum. Thirty-seven years later it sits at one of the weirdest intersections in hip-hop history — Uptown’s first Platinum hip-hop record, the album that cross-bred New Jack Swing with rap before anyone had a name for it, and the LP that quietly housed the first ever production credit of a 19-year-old kid from Mount Vernon named Peter Phillips. We know him as Pete Rock.

Uptown Records’ First Platinum Stake in the Ground

To understand why Big Tyme matters, you have to understand what Uptown Records was in June 1989. Andre Harrell — Dr. Jeckyll of the late-70s rap duo Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde — had only launched the label in 1986. Heavy D & the Boyz’s 1987 debut Living Large went Gold and put Uptown on the map, but Heavy needed a Platinum follow-up to make the label more than a one-Heavy operation. Big Tyme delivered that. Within a year of its release, Harrell would sign a teenage Mary J. Blige (1989) and Jodeci (1990), and bring on a young assistant named Sean Combs (1990) who would A&R Mary’s What’s the 411? and Jodeci’s Forever My Lady before getting fired and starting Bad Boy. The Uptown lineage that produced The Notorious B.I.G., the Bad Boy empire, and the entire mid-90s hip-hop soul movement — all of it sits downstream of Heavy D making this album work.

The Producer Roll Call That Shouldn’t Have Existed in 1989

Look at the credits and the math gets weird. Big Tyme was produced by DJ Eddie F (Heavy’s cousin and the in-house Boyz producer), Teddy Riley — who had invented New Jack Swing the year before with Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel and Guy’s self-titled debut — Al B. Sure!, Marley Marl coming off In Control Vol. 1, and Pete Rock, then a teenage WBLS mixshow apprentice with literally zero professional credits to his name. Marley Marl had reportedly told Eddie F to give the kid a shot. Riley’s contribution — the lead single “We Got Our Own Thang” (released May 9, 1989) — is the cleanest possible blueprint of how New Jack Swing’s swing-funk drum programming could carry a rap record without diluting it. Eddie F handled the bulk of the album. Pete Rock got his name in liner notes for the first time, on a Platinum LP, age 19. The career that gave us “T.R.O.Y.,” “The World Is Yours,” “Reminisce,” and Mecca and the Soul Brother starts here.

The Trouble T. Roy Thread Nobody Walks Through Anymore

Here’s the receipt most people don’t connect. Big Tyme is the last full Heavy D & the Boyz LP recorded with the original lineup, because on July 15, 1990 — 13 months after this album dropped — dancer and group member Troy “Trouble T. Roy” Dixon fell from a balcony in Indianapolis after a tour stop and died. He was 22. Pete Rock, who had just gotten his first production credit on Big Tyme, was close enough with the Uptown camp that he wrote a tribute beat using a Tom Scott “Today” sample and brought it to Heavy D first. Heavy passed. CL Smooth wrote a verse over it instead. They called it “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.).” It came out on 1992’s Mecca and the Soul Brother and became one of the most sample-worshipped, emotionally heavy hip-hop records ever cut. The line runs clean: Big Tyme (1989) — Pete Rock’s first credit, T. Roy alive — to T.R.O.Y. (1992), the elegy that defined how hip-hop mourns its own. You can’t have one without the other.

The Tribute Lives On

Pete Rock’s first production credit came on Big Tyme. His most important one came three years later, mourning Trouble T. Roy. The Mecca and the Soul Brother tee carries the full receipt.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• Mariah Carey’s self-titled debut turns 36 — Columbia Records dropped the LP on June 12, 1990. The Mariah-meets-hip-hop bridge gets built right here: “Fantasy” remix with ODB (1995), “Always Be My Baby” remix with Jermaine Dupri (1996), “Breakdown” with Bone Thugs (1997), “I’m Real” / “Always on Time” with Ja Rule (2001). One of the most important R&B-rap crossover careers in chart history starts on this date.
• Don Toliver turns 32 — Born June 12, 1994 in Houston. Cactus Jack signee since 2018. “No Idea” and “After Party” are both triple-Platinum, and Life of a DON (2021) made him one of the only Cactus Jack roster artists to chart a #2 Billboard 200 LP outside Travis himself.
• Jessie Reyez turns 35 — Born June 12, 1991 in Toronto. Colombian-Canadian; “Figures” (2016) was the catalyst. Now a six-time Juno-nominated R&B presence with Eminem co-signs on Music to Be Murdered By and The Death of Slim Shady.
• YG survives a Studio City shooting (2015) — June 12, 2015: rapper YG took three bullets to the hip outside an LA recording studio. Walked it off, kept recording, released Still Brazy exactly a year later (June 17, 2016) — one of the most defiant comeback records of the 2010s.

If you’re new here, our deep-cut reads on Pete Rock’s catalog roots run through the golden-age architects who set the table for him, and our take on the Uptown-to-Def Jam pipeline covers what happened to Andre Harrell’s roster after Big Tyme made the label too big to ignore.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team