The Killing of Tupac Shakur (25 page)

Some credit Philadelphia’s Schooly D as being the original hard-core gangsta rapper. Others claim the hard-core rap style was officially launched with Ice-T’s 1987
Rhyme Pays
album.

On the East Coast, Def Jam’s LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys (who are white) elevated gangsta rap into a prevailing musical influence. Conversely, it was Compton’s N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) who pioneered gangsta rap on the West Coast. Dr. Dre, who would later found Death Row with Suge Knight, was an early member of N.W.A.

Gangsta rap, which chronicles the bleak and often violent way of life of the residents of the nation’s toughest black neighborhoods, has increasingly sparked controversy since it emerged in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Much of the controversy has centered on the violence-packed lyrics. The music industry, defending its artistic freedom and arguing that music doesn’t cause violence, rode out a storm of criticism. Some of the criticism was prompted by a practice of the record companies in hiring rappers with criminal backgrounds.

The gangsta rap rivalry developed when West Coast rappers grew more popular, surpassing the record sales of East Coast rappers. But Biggie Smalls, who built his gangsta rap persona around a troubled past that included admitted crack dealing, albeit short-lived, was credited with reviving the East Coast scene (thus rivaling West Coast sales) in 1994 on the Bad Boy label, which was launched in 1993 by entrepreneur Sean “Puffy” Combs (now known as P-Diddy), then a 22-year-old college student.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), since 1996 record sales for rap total more than $1 billion. Rap/hip-hop in 2000 was among the favorite genres of 29% of music consumers, up six points from 2000, the RIAA reported. Industry statistics indicate Death Row Records alone generated $100 million; its hard-core recordings
by Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg ranked as the most successful. Bad Boy Entertainment sold about $75 million worth of albums in 1996 from such artists as the Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, Craig Mack, and 112.

Early on, Sean Combs developed a reputation for cockiness and arrogance, and Suge Knight, in turn, developed a dislike for Combs. After Tupac joined Death Row, he too openly criticized Bad Boy rappers, particularly the Notorious B.I.G. And Tupac fanned the flames with his public pronouncements on rap.

In Tupac’s own estimation, no one could rap like Tupac.

“Nobody can talk about pain like Tupac,” he told
Vibe
magazine about himself. “No one knows it like me. It separates me from other rappers. All the pain I’m talking about in my rap, you can see it.” Tupac prided himself in embodying the thug-life aspect of gangsta rap.

When asked why he had adopted a thug persona, Tupac said, “Because if I don’t, I’ll lose everything I have. Who else is going to love me but the thugs?”

Tupac—and, no doubt, Suge Knight—knew that the harder the lyrics, the larger the sales. Tupac had both “THUG LIFE” and “OUTLAW” tattooed on his body.

Writer Kevin Powell said being an outlaw in music was nothing new. “In black culture, the outlaw figure has always existed, beginning with Chuck Berry,” Powell said. “Sometimes people will put on the persona. A lot of times Pac wasn’t the person he was rapping about; he
became
it. A lot of people in this generation have an ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ attitude.

“Hip-hop music is really a reaction to the failures and the fallacies of the so-called civil-rights movement. A lot of these people say, ‘We can vote now, we can sit in the bus, in the restaurant, but we don’t own the bus, we don’t own the restaurant.’ So we say, ‘Fuck it.’ That’s why you see a lot of people, white or black, frustrated. White kids are alienated too. They identify with rap and the hip-hop culture. It is the most cutting-edge, most aggressive music out there. It’s very rebellious. Historically, white youth have always identified
with cultures that were rebellious. Tupac, like me, like Kurt Cobain [a grunge rocker from the Seattle musical movement who committed suicide], represented the bleak outlook on life that this generation, our generation, feels.”

Prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks on American soil and the U.S. war on terrorism, Powell said this: “I definitely understand why all these records are being sold. It’s like the sixties, except there’s no political movement. It’s like an anarchy. [For] a bunch of young people—black, white, straight, gay—it’s like an individual revolt. Look at him. On one hand, Tupac was this superstar, but on the other he was another young black man in jail.”

Americans have long been fascinated with the connection between criminal life and pop culture—Frank Sinatra and his alleged mobster pals, for example, were immortalized in the
Godfather
saga. “Beneath all the ethnic specificity, these rappers are really imitating the lifestyle of white gangsters,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson Jr. said after Tupac and Biggie were killed. “They have chosen white role models.”

According to police, gangsta rap isn’t organized enough to imitate the real mob.

“Gangs are considered disorganized-organized crime,” homicide Sergeant Kevin Manning said. “[The Mafia] has a hierarchy. It’s very organized. Everybody knows who reports to whom. It’s not that way with gangs. They’re organized in their own way. It’s very fleeting. Everything they do seems random, but they are very powerful and violent.”

Retired Sergeant Bill Keeton, who worked for 11 years in LVMPD’s organized-crime unit, said that the violence rap singers have brought with them from the streets “is a cultural thing.”

“Even though they make a lot of money,” Keeton said, “you can take the kid out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the kid. It’s not organized crime. They’re brought up around armed robberies, [and] they’re pulling guns on each other.”

Manning agreed, saying, “These guys come up from the
streets and make millions of dollars. You’ve got somebody with a [gang] mentality who has a talent, but he can’t handle it.”

Gangsta rap focuses on the young-black-male segment of society that has historically been ravaged by crime. Gangsta rap has also been described as a form of release for those living in the ghetto, imprisoned and unable to lift themselves out. Still, it’s mostly the young people from the suburbs who buy the music, according to statistics. Rhymes from Tupac and other rappers have became a mantra of sorts for youth of all colors.

“Is the hip-hop generation all about violence and degradation?” CNN commentator Farai Chideya asked in a
Time
magazine piece published shortly after Biggie Smalls’ murder. “Are we collectively doomed to go the way of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls? I hope not, because I’m a member of that generation. In the weeks to come, as we try to make sense of the deaths of two of the youngest, richest, best-known black men in America, we’ll probably succumb to a natural temptation to divide the ‘good kids’ from the ‘hip-hop kids.’ I’m not buying it. I grew up listening to hip-hop. In elementary school I tuned my radio to the techno-influenced chant of ‘Planet Rock’ and innocent party jams like ‘Rappers Delight.’ By high school and college, hip-hop was everything from the pop female braggadocio of Salt-n-Pepa to the black nationalism of Public Enemy. Today, in addition to music that ranges from alternative rock to techno, I listen to rough-edged rappers [like] the Wu Tang Clan—and, yes, Biggie and Tupac as well. ...

“Who’s pushing the rawest rhymes to No. 1 on the charts? For years now, the largest volume of hip-hop albums has been sold to white suburban kids who’ve deposed heavy metal and elevated hip-hop to the crown of Music Most Likely To Infuriate My Parents. The suburban rebellion—its record-buying tastes, its voyeurism of what too often it views as ‘authentic black culture’—has contributed to the primacy of the gangsta-rap genre.

“The music may be in white America’s homes, but the violence is in black America’s neighborhoods. That’s why we,
the hip-hop generation, bear the ultimate responsibility for reshaping the art form we love. Hip-hop used to lift us above the struggles we faced; then it tried to inform us about the struggles we faced; now it’s
become
one of the struggles we face. I used to tell myself that the ‘thug life’ portrayed in the music was just fiction. Now it’s incontrovertible fact. We can do better than this. If we don’t, we’re little more than voyeurs of our own demise.”

• • •

While the murders of Tupac and Biggie spurred record sales, the long-term effects initially weren’t good for business. After the rappers’ murders, the larger record companies and distributors asked themselves whether business should continue as usual. The music industry has weathered a storm of criticism for backing gangsta rap and its violent lyrics, especially when those lyrics became self-fulfilling prophesies. Some industry executives wondered if it was ethical to be in business with characters with questionable backgrounds, just so they could cash in on the lucrative market of gangsta-rap record sales. The financial stakes are high, and the answers are seemingly contradictory. To survive, the hip-hop music industry needed to turn its bad-boy image around, while also maintaining its street authenticity.

When then-Senator Robert Dole, an outspoken moral crusader, singled out Death Row for producing albums with lyrics that he said were unfit for the youth of America, Time Warner, Death Row’s distributor at the time, severed its ties with the label.

The white corporate world of the record industry is what Suge Knight, Puffy Combs, and other black record producers had to penetrate to get their rappers into middle-class America. One rap insider described Combs and Knight as “middle men, liaisons between corporate America and black rappers.”

But according to other insiders, the bloodshed following Tupac’s death alarmed corporate bigwigs backing the rap
record labels, so much so that they took a harder look at who was being allowed to run their labels. “There is an uneasiness with gangsta rap even among the black executives and artists,” the
New York Times
wrote in a feature about rap published before Tupac was killed.

That sentiment has been enhanced by the escalation of violence on the heels of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Some prominent industry executives privately questioned whether greed was blinding record companies to the body count connected to gangsta rap. A decision to tone down the music could have had enormous financial ramifications—less money for record companies.

With the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, the future of the heads of Death Row and Bad Boy were uncertain. After all, Suge was in prison; Puffy was free but frightened.

As Death Row’s battleship sank into an ocean of bad publicity, some of its stalwarts abandoned ship. In 1996, Dr. Dre split acrimoniously with Death Row, telling the
Hollywood Reporter
only days before Tupac’s shotting, “Gangsta rap is definitely a thing of the past. I’ve just moved on.”

In the end, rappers, by the turn of the 21st century, had cleaned up their lyrics. The beat went on, but a little softer.

• • •

Death Row unsuccessfully attempted to sell the car in which Tupac was shot. After learning that Primadonna Resorts in Primm, Nevada, had purchased the bullet-riddled car in which Bonnie and Clyde Barrow were killed in a 1934 shootout, a representative from Death Row contacted the casino company. Aaron Cohen, a spokesman for the resort, said they told Death Row casino executives they weren’t interested in buying the car.

Cohen explained: “It’s not a piece of American history the way the Bonnie and Clyde car is. Maybe in 20 years it will be.”

Likewise, the rental-car company that owned the vehicle in which Biggie was shot briefly flirted with raising money
from the bullet-riddled door of the car Biggie was killed in. On Sunday, April 27, 1997, LAPD returned Biggie’s 1997 GMC Suburban to Budget Rent A Car of Beverly Hills, which had rented the Suburban to the Los Angeles production company FM Rocks. At the time, police told co-owner Corky Rice they were finished with their analyses of the Suburban. Shortly thereafter a story ran across The Associated Press wire that the bullet-riddled door from the vehicle’s front passenger side was about to be offered on the auction block to raise money for charity. The passenger door was the only part of the vehicle damaged during the shooting.

“We haven’t decided when or where to auction the door,” Rice told reporters at the time. “We don’t want to be tacky. We want to be in good taste. We don’t want to make any profit at all. Everybody’s telling me the door must have some value. We’d like to somehow find a way to sell the door to the highest bidder and then donate the money to charity. I’m trying to figure out how to turn this terrible incident into something good. If you put the money to good use, I don’t think it’s in bad taste.”

But police intervened before the door hit the auction block: LAPD detectives returned on April 30 and once again confiscated the door. “They said it was for evidence,” Rice said.

In the end, neither the BMW Tupac was murdered in nor the door from the Suburban in which Biggie was shot were sold.

• • •

On top of everything else, on January 7, 1997, Suge, David Kenner, and Death Row were sued in Los Angeles Superior Court by American Express Travel Related Services. American Express claimed that Suge, Kenner, Kenner’s wife Erica, and Death Row Records owed the credit-card company upwards of $1.5 million. American Express alleged a breach of contract and sought payment in full, plus court costs, attorney’s fees, and prejudgment interest.

The court documents itemized Death Row’s expenses, including those charged while Tupac Shakur lay in a coma at University Medical Center, a paper trial that led to limousine services, pricey hotel rooms, and private planes.

Kenner held both gold and platinum American Express accounts. Erica Kenner was also a signatory on a credit card. Suge and Death Row employees were authorized to make charges on the platinum account, but only with Kenner’s approval, the weekly alternative newspaper the
New Times
in Los Angeles reported.

American Express stated in its suit that “all parties had customarily used and paid for charges before October 1996 on Kenner’s cards with no objections.” Kenner had paid for his and his wife’s expenses “regularly and promptly,” the credit card company said. Death Row debts were paid for with checks from Death Row’s corporate account, which was administered by Kenner, according to a civil suit filed against Suge by Dr. Dre.