RAP at the Crossroads

"I thought Tupac's death was going to be the end of it, but the psychodrama keeps going. The murder of Christopher Wallace is the latest in what is becoming a pathetic string of deaths. And the speed with which the media turned this unnecessary tragedy into evidence of a 'Rap War,' a 'Slay Revenge,' makes me worry that we haven't heard the last shots ring out yet."

Quincy Jones In Vibe, May 1997

Sean "Puffy" Combs, founder and chief executive of Bad Boy Entertainment, had an announcement to make. It was late August 1997 and he was in his role as one of the shrewdest marketers of music in the Nineties, addressing a symposium of journalists in New York City. Combs' ability to switch gears from record executive to producer to performer had already earned him the nickname the Cipher. Shortly after the murder of Christopher Wallace, he explained, he had declared he was donating a portion of the profits from the Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous album, Life After Death, to a Bad Boy-affiliated charity. He had decided to rethink the message his label was sending to rap fans. "My goal is to live long enough to see my son graduate from school," he said. That goal might be a difficult one to reach. Combs' hopes are similar to sentiments expressed by his best friend, the Notorious B.I.G. "I want to go to my daughter's wedding and my son's wedding," Biggie Smalls said last March. He died the next night.

Article by Alec Foege

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

A real gangsta-ass nigger plays his cards right.

A real gangsta-ass nigger never runs his fucking mouth.

'Cause real gangsta-ass niggers don't start fights.

Geto Boys, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta (1992)

Rappers are griots, American story-tellers. Biggie and Tupac Shakur were overtaken by the violence they rapped about. While that fact may provide some poetic irony, it does not indict rap. Nor do their deaths signal an end to the gangsters who control entire neighborhoods. But media reports on the deaths of Smalls and Shakur often misinterpret or overstate the importance of violence in rap music.

The key to these two rappers' popularity had as much to do with their songs' innovative beats and music as with their agile use of words. Musically and lyrically, their presence will continue to be felt. Rap, after all, is the only form of popular music today with any real meaning or connection to real life.

Rap music has also been a real moneymaker for the major record labels. In 1996 rap music accounted for 56 million albums sold and more than $1 billion in sales in the U.S., constituting nine percent of all domestic record sales. While sales of other forms of music are flat or shrinking, sales of rap rose five percent during the first six months of 1997 (the second-biggest jump, after R&B). And, on the strength of new hot-selling releases by Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, the year-end results should be even better. Wu-Tang Clan outsold the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones.

Meanwhile, rap is also succeeding internationally, to the surprise of record execs who thought it wouldn't sell beyond North America. Combs is the man who's making it global. He's responsible for 1997's Macarena (I'll Be Missing You has sold more than 7 million copies worldwide). Yet he spent much of 1997 watching his back. His career has been shaped by two driving forces of the genre: the emergence of rap as a financial powerhouse and the black-on-black violence that is the leading cause of death among young black men in America.

To refresh your memory: Last March 9, Christopher Wallace, the 24-year-old, 300-pound rapper known professionally both as the Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, was killed at a stoplight outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles' mid-Wilshire district. He had just attended a party the night after the Soul Train Music Awards. Sitting in the front seat of a GMC Suburban, Wallace took several bullets in the chest from a nine-millimeter handgun wielded by an unidentified black male wearing a suit and bow tie. Combs, Biggie's friend and producer, was in the car in front of B.I.G.'s.

On September 7, 1996 the 25-year-old platinum record-selling rapper Tupac Shakur was shot in a similar situation. That time the town was Las Vegas, where Shakur had just watched the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight. He was riding in a black BMW 750 driven by Marion "Suge" Knight, chief executive of Shakur's label, Death Row Records. A late-model white Cadillac pulled up to the passenger side of the car and someone inside started shooting. Knight was grazed in the head by one bullet. Shakur wasn't so lucky. After six days in the University Medical Center, during which time doctors tended to massive chest wounds and removed his perforated right lung, Shakur died.

Then there's the troubled state of Death Row Records. The label was hatched in 1992 by Knight (once a star defensive lineman at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas) and Andre "Dr. Dre" Young. Together with rappers Ice Cube and Eazy-E, Dre was a member of the protogangsta rap group N.W.A. His first solo release, The Chronic, sold 4 million copies and made Death Row an instant player. But on February 28, 1997 Los Angeles Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger ordered Knight, 32, to serve out a nine-year sentence in San Luis Obispo state prison. The night of Tupac's murder, security cameras in the lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel caught Knight--who was on probation for a 1992 assault--participating in the beating of Orlando Anderson, a reputed member of Los Angeles' Southside Crips. At the time, Knight was head of the most successful rap label in history, with $100 million in annual sales. With his absence, the future of Death Row is in jeopardy.

You claim to be a player but I fucked your wife.

We bust on Bad Boy niggers fucked for life.

Plus Puffy trying to see me--weak hearts I rip.

Biggie Smalls and Junior Mafia some marked-ass bitches.

Lil' Kim, don't fuck around with real Gs Quick to snatch your ugly ass off the street.

So fuck peace.

Biggie Smalls just got dropped.

Little Moos, pass the Mac, and let me hit him in his back.

Tupac Shakur, Hit 'Em Up (1996)

Imagine what their stash is like.

Make you a classic like my first LP.

Beef with me is unhealthy.

Fuck around and get an ulcer.

Lose your pulse or collapsed lung.

Look how many gats I brung.

The Notorious B.I.G., Last Day (1997)

Biggie and Tupac were pictured in the media (and occasionally in PR hype) as heads of two warring street armies: East Coast versus West Coast, Bloods versus Crips, Bad Boy versus Death Row. Now that they appear to have been the victims of separate beefs with members of the Southside Crips, the image seems less realistic. The government nevertheless seems bent on getting rid of the problem by getting rid of rap. Gangsta rap may have been marketed too hard and too far.

"I'm sure Tupac could have prevented what happened to him," says Heavy D, rapper, producer and senior vice president at Universal Records. "I believe the whole thing would have been resolved. Tupac and Biggie would have made records together. It got so out of hand, and then the public got involved. It became another example of what is really going on in urban black America. I spent a lot of time with both these brothers. It may be hard for someone who didn't know them to understand how nice these guys were. Their lyrics came from what they saw in a certain environment. Hip-hop is based on the essence of it all, but you get these kids looking at it like it's real. When you talk about killing people and shooting people, they take it like, 'Oh yeah, that's the new flava,' like they're talking about a pair of sneakers. That's the thing that really scares me."

"Isn't that tripped out that they still haven't found the killers in either case?" asks Chuck D, leader of Public Enemy and rap's preeminent elder statesman. "If somebody had killed the CEO of a major label, they would have found the killer within a week. See, the black community is not in control of its reality--its education, its law enforcement, its economics or its environment. That's why a gangster fantasy can take root. No matter how much somebody says 'Keep it real, keep it real,' real can be a projected image because corporations make a killing off black death. Tupac and Biggie sell more than ever--and the beneficiaries are Clive Davis and Arista Records, Jimmy Iovine and Interscope and other companies. I believe in letting artists speak their (continued on page 108) Rap at the Crossroros (continued from page 64) minds, but remember, there's somebody pushing the buttons behind Suge Knight and Puffy Combs. So I always look at the guy at the top of the pyramid, and there ain't nobody black at, the top of that pyramid. The murder of two of our brightest stars comes out of neglect by the same companies that distribute their material."

Chuck D thinks the media blew up the hype. "Vibe and The Source played into a simple thing that probably was a personal beef between Biggie and Tupac," he says. "It was financially beneficial for everyone to make something out of it. In the black community, it's easy to make something out of nothing."

"There are people out there we call haters--people who don't like to see you get your shine on," says Wyclef Jean, of the Fugees, who recently released a critically acclaimed solo album, The Carnival. "They always have something to say about you, and the bigger you get, the more they say. So you have to watch your back. Anybody can catch a bullet. I have guns for personal protection, because I'm out there and people see me. Everywhere I walk there's an eye looking at me. And you never know what's going to happen."

I hear the doctor standing over me, Screaming I can make it. Got a body full of bullet holes, Laying here naked.

Tupac Shakur, Only God Can Judge Me (1996)

Shakur's 1991 debut, 2Pacalypse Now, had plenty of violent lyrics. But it also contained Brenda's Got a Baby, inspired by a newspaper account of a 12-year-old girl who, impregnated by her cousin, dumped her newborn child into an incinerator. Tupac knew both sides of the street. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a Black Panther, but by his teen years she had developed alcohol and drug problems.

"I put Tupac on his first tour," says Chuck D. "When he came into the game, he was smarter than average--a quiet kid who just wanted to do his thing. He was a Digital Underground [a Bay Area rap group] extra dancer and extra rhymer, and they opened for our 1990 tour. In 1992 he was in the movie Juice, which I helped score. He's a natural. Omar Epps was the other kid in the movie, but who got the most rave reviews? The one who was most thug--and that was Tupac's character, Bishop. When he played the good guy in Poetic Justice, the reviews were like, 'That shit was wack.' The more he dipped into the world of Bishop, the bigger star he became."

On the evening of November 30, 1994, Shakur and three companions entered the lobby of Quad Studios in midtown Manhattan. Shakur was in town for a trial on what he claimed were trumped-up charges of sexual abuse, sodomy and weapons possession. (One night in 1993 Tupac met a 19-year-old woman at the New York club Nell's. She performed oral sex on him on the dance floor before he took her back to his hotel room. Four days later, she claimed, she visited Shakur at his hotel, but this time she was forced to fellate Tupac and another man.) On his way to Quad to record vocals on a song by rapper Little Shawn, Shakur was shot five times in the building's lobby by three black men. They robbed him of gold jewelry worth $40,000.

Shakur later claimed in a magazine interview that Biggie Smalls had somehow been involved in the shooting. Biggie had been in the building, at a recording session, at the time. Tupac had earlier received a series of phone calls. During one conversation he had a brief disagreement about being paid for the Little Shawn session--Tupac had asked for $7000--and there was a call urging him to the studio.

Shakur's description of the holdup is frighteningly real. "The dude with the newspaper was telling the light-skinned dude, 'Shoot that motherfucker! Fuck it!' Then I got scared because the dude had the gun to my stomach. All I could think about was piss bags and shit bags," he told Vibe. After he was shot in the stomach, "I had my eyes closed but I was shaking, because the situation had me shaking."

Shakur was still in bandages when he appeared in court. He was convicted of two counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to a one-and-a-half- to four-and-a-half-year term. Although he was cleared of sodomy and weapons charges, he was sent to New York's Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Dannemora, New York. Shakur was convinced he had been set up.

•

This instant, rappers too persistent, Quick to spit Biggie name on shit. Make my name taste like ass when you speak it.

See me in the street, your jewelry you can keep it.

That be our little secret.

The Notorious B.I.G., What's Beef (1997)

While Shakur was upstate, the Notorious B.I.G.'s career took off. In 1993, when he was starting Bad Boy, Sean Combs bet his career on Biggie, a young rapper who once dealt crack on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Combs signed Wallace after hearing a demo tape and Wallace became the Notorious B.I.G., the first big act on Bad Boy. Biggie wanted to go legit. In 1994 Ready to Die, his first album, sold 1.5 million copies.

Biggie tried to defuse the popular perception that there was a rap war. "They'd gone and made a personal beef between me and them into a coastal beef, East against West," he told The Source. "That's bananas right there. I never did nothing wrong to Tupac. I never did nothing wrong to Faith Evans [Biggie's wife]. And I kept quiet. I kept my mouth shut." He may have made oblique references to Shakur in his lyrics, but he always denied it. "I'm scared to death," he once told the Chicago Tribune. "Scared of getting my brains blown out."

•

All you old rappers trying to advance:

It's all over now,

Take it like a man.

Niggers looking like Larry Holmes, flabby and sick,

Trying to play your hate on my shit.

Eat a fat dick.

Makaveli (A.K.A. Tupac Shakur), Against All Odds (1996)

In 1988 the runaway success of N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton was a sign of a schism within hip-hop. Initially, gangsta rap took Public Enemy's anti-establishment message one step further and declared war on all authority. However, success as an original gangsta demanded that you be authentic--a difficult position to maintain if you're driving a Bentley and living in the suburbs. No longer were the police the only targets. Competitors were fair game. And new artists took aim at their predecessors for their diminished credibility. In 1992 Knight and Dr. Dre turned gangsta rap into a cottage industry with Dre's The Chronic. Knight took credit for achieving something that had eluded Public Enemy: His artists (continued on page 201) Rrp at the Crossroros (continued from page 108) made MTV's regular rotation, and he got them airplay on the radio. He also paid his artists better royalties than other labels--at least on paper.

That same year police groups--along with Vice President Dan Quayle--criticized Time Warner for releasing Ice-T's song Cop Killer, another in-character exposition on police brutality. (Cop Killer was actually recorded by Body Count, Ice-T's rock-and-roll side project, and is not a rap song at all.) By then, Ice-T and Ice Cube had already made the transition to movies and ersatz versions of "keeping it real" (originally street lingo for gang-banging). These artists lost much of their original cachet once they became successful. (Suge Knight was determined this wouldn't happen to his artists. He made sure they had a presence in Compton, and made it a practice to hire people--sometimes even ex-cons--from the neighborhood.)

But rap could no longer be contained to the ghetto, which may explain some of the vehemence of its critics. Much has been made of the fact that 70 percent of rap records are purchased by whites. But this figure can be misleading. "What is the percentage of black people in America, 12 percent?" asks music critic Dave Marsh. "Black people buy two and a half times as much rap as whites. I don't think people came up with this figure because they wanted to destroy hiphop. I think they wanted to destroy hiphop because they saw this number."

Make no mistake: Rap remains undeniably integral to the experience of growing up black in the U.S. "Ten years ago I said rap was black America's CNN," says Chuck D. "Gangsta's popularity took off in the hood. The reasons weren't so much lyrical, they were more musical. It was the acceptance of funk. You had nice music from the Seventies and you could--you had to--fill in a more aggressive vocal. With the pretty music offset by harder-than-life vocals, you had a new thing. But the phenomenon was nothing new. It's black-hate-black shit. Black people were taught to hate themselves. They were rapping about killing their own people. That was one thing that never happened in Public Enemy. You could get paid to kill a nigger in this country as opposed to making a nigger grow into a black person. Now, if these gangster guys had talked about killing white kids on every one of their records, that would've been interesting, wouldn't it?"

The connection (real or fabled) between gangster and gangsta soon intensified. When Knight sprang Shakur out of prison in October 1995--flying him out of New York in a private plane--after securing his $1.4 million bail, Shakur began rhyming with a vengeance. (While Knight may have taken credit for posting bail, Interscope and Time Warner reportedly put up most of the money.) His first postprison release, All Eyez on Me (which sold 7 million copies), included derogatory references to Biggie and Puffy. On Hit 'Em Up, a B-side to a single from the album, he claimed he had slept with Faith Evans. (Evans denied the claim.)

Knight had modeled Death Row on The Godfather and Scarface. His office at Death Row's Can-Am studios in Tarzana, California was done in red, the color of the Bloods, from carpets to walls to his extra-large leather chair. He kept piranhas in a tank and fed them mice. In New York, Puffy Combs and Biggie took inspiration from Goodfellas and referred to themselves on their songs as the Commission. Puff, too, was the godfather from whom all things--champagne, money, women--flowed. The imagery was designed to appeal to the streets and borrowed heavily from the West Coast repertoire of Cristal, chronic and Hennessy. Combs' reworking of the Death Row formula was probably the biggest reason for bad blood between the two labels. Combs, who attended Howard University and grew up in suburban Mount Vernon, New York, is not above putting on a show either. "Aside from any East Coast-West Coast bullshit," says music critic Nelson George, "these were young guys with a lot of money. The words in gangsta rap were obviously part of the appeal, but that isn't the only reason they sold millions of records." If rap stars aren't gangsters, then why the emphasis on violence? A lot of it is driven by the market--lyrics about guns and women sell. But the executives at record companies don't understand rap. "They have little reference to determine what's good or bad," says Georges Sulmers, owner of the independent hip-hop label Raw Shack. "So they lean toward stuff that worked in the past. We used to have different sorts of artists. Now it's just East versus West, and both sides talk about shooting. It's hard to believe everybody had the same idea at the same time. I don't believe all urban music comes from the same gene pool."

Michael Eric Dyson, professor of communications studies at the University of North Carolina, believes the street between black artists and record companies runs both ways. "Even though black artists are often ripe for the picking, and thus susceptible to exploitation by white and black record labels," he writes in Between God and Gangsta Rap, "many of them are quite sophisticated about the politics of representation. Many gangsta rappers helped create the genre's artistic rules. They have figured out how to financially exploit sincere and sensational interest in ghetto life. Gangsta rap is no less legitimate because many gangstas turn out to be middle-class blacks faking homeboy roots."

"Fans in general find the violence interesting," says Wyclef Jean. "You have two groups of kids--the kids who live in the hood and the suburban kids. In the ghetto, they know the deaths of Tupac and Biggie had nothing to do with hiphop. But when I'm chilling with my friends from the suburbs--I got mad friends from the burbs--they say, 'Yo, Tupac ain't really dead.' Or, 'The beef was some East Coast-West Coast stuff.' I didn't like what I was seeing in the press: Biggie Smalls: Ex-Crack Dealer. This guy turned his life around, and sometimes I feel that's not perceived."

"With me it's not a white thing, a black thing, a green thing, a yellow thing," Jean adds. "We say the white man put guns in the community, but he also put a library there. There's drugs in the community, but there's drug rehab, too."

"There was no rapper out there like Biggie," says 22-year-old Kim Jones, a former girlfriend of Biggie's who records under the name Lil' Kim. Her 1996 debut release, Hard Core, was a huge hit. "But there still is street rap. See, gangsta rap is gangsters who rap. I don't think Biggie and Tupac were-gangsters. They didn't kill people, throw up signs--well, I couldn't say that, but they didn't go around killing people. They didn't want to do anything that would harm their entertainment careers. They had too much to lose."

Now let me welcome everybody to the wild, wild West,

A state that's untouchable, like Eliot Ness.

The track hits your eardrum like a slug to your chest.

Tupac Shakur, California Love (1996)

If there's a beef between us, We can settle it With that chrome-metal shit. I make it hot, like a kettle get.

The Notorious - B.I.G., Kick in the Door (1997)

Though rap didn't kill Biggie Smalls or "Tupac Shakur, it's more than coincidence that so much violence and crime has been directed at rap stars. "In a spiritual sense, these two guys were obsessed with death," says Nelson George. "Tupac and Biggie may have talked about killing other people, but they primarily talked about being murdered. Their mortality was an integral part of their art."

"The murders had nothing to do with the East Coast or West Coast," says Wyclef Jean. "They were just personal beefs. I knew Tupac, and I had met Biggie a few times. They were wonderful kids. When I first met Tupac, I thought he was the funniest guy in the world. He was talking about how he wanted to work with me. He liked my unconventional approach. We hung out that night. I got a good vibe off him. And when the Fugees weren't that big we would open up for Biggie Smalls. He was another comedian. People don't realize how young these kids were."

Rappers who grew up impoverished and who rap about the streets are forced to try to balance their newfound wealth with their old lives and friends. Unless artists want to hire or subsidize a huge entourage (certainly not uncommon in entertainment circles), they are in no position to criticize their friends for getting involved in the sorts of illegal activities the rappers boast about on CD. Nor could they control their friends' hotheaded reactions to public insults issued during the heyday of the so-called Death Row-Bad Boy feud.

Even when Shakur and Smalls had been reduced to the level of cartoon characters, people were still confused about what was real and what was an act. "The people in the hood know who's keeping it real," says Wyclef Jean. "There's no way you're going to be an entertainer making millions of dollars and convince me you're mad. You're not upset at nothing at all. You're putting on a front and an act. That's what's selling. I buy into your story, though. When Snoop is saying ' 187 on an undercover cop,' it sounds convincing. I believe Snoop's story. I believe Tupac's story. At one time keeping it real meant not to dent, to have a skully on your face and be mad. That's the image they portrayed, but they weren't going to ghetto clubs and acting like that, because they know they'd get their asses kicked."

"A lot of gangsta rappers are admired and receive respect from tough guys in the hood," says Jim Galipeau, 55, a gangs expert who has worked as a probation officer in South Central Los Angeles for more than three decades. "But I don't know of any big-time gangsters who are rappers. Basically rappers are lightweights who happened to grow up in the neighborhood. However, I think rappers influence the gangsters in terms of taste, dress and language."

Shakur was persuasive (perhaps even more on film than on CD) as a thug. But so was Jimmy Cagney. Rappers know enough to play the crossover bit for the mass market, but they don't know enough to convince real players. The people with the record-company publicists aren't riding around in limos because they're tough guys. If real gangsters are obliged to settle a score, they emerge from the shadows to show us who actually lives the thug life.

Still down for that Death Row sound, searching for paydays.

No longer Dre day, arrivederci. Long forgotten, rotten for plotting child's play. Check your sexuality, as fruity as this Alizé.

Quick to jump ship, punk trick, what a dumb move.

Crossed Death Row, now who you gonna run to?

Like all those other suckers 'cause you similar.

Pretending to be hard--oh my God--check your temperature.

Screaming Compton, but you can't return, you ain't heard?

Brothers pissed 'cause you switched and escaped to the burbs.

Makaveli, Toss It Up (1996)

"Being famous in this business is great," says Heavy D, "but it's poisonous. It's not reality. That's why you see so many really famous people flip out. I began to hear, 'Whoa, they're starting to believe those videos.'"

Tupac Shakur felt secure traveling with his Death Row entourage (a West Coast rider, he called himself). He began to believe his own poster. Instead of making himself untouchable, he turned into a bigger target--particularly for those who were in the game for real. He may have forgotten who had the most to lose when the Death Row crew mixed it up in that hotel lobby in Las Vegas. Dr. Dre left Death Row several months before Shakur was killed. "Gangsta rap is dead," he announced. This past summer he even went further and came out in praise of Bad Boy.

It's like the more money we come across, The more problems we see.

The Notorious B.I.G., Mo Money Mo Problems (1997)

Despite a $50,000 reward for tips leading to the conviction of Biggie's killer, no arrests have been made. For now, the chances of finding Tupac's assassin seem equally unlikely.

The one witness in Las Vegas who said at the scene of the crime he could possibly identify Tupac's shooter was Yafeu Fula, a member of Outlaw Immortalz, a rap group that toured with Shakur. But Fula never really talked seriously with Vegas police. Negotiations for a meeting between the cops and Fula's attorney dragged on. Two months after the shooting Fula was killed in New Jersey. A year before Shakur's death, Randy Walker-- who was with Shakur the night he was shot at Quad Studios--was killed by three gunmen in Queens after a car chase. So much for the East Coast. Two months earlier, a close friend of Suge Knight's, Jake Robles, was fatally shot in Atlanta. Suge blamed associates of Bad Boy for Robles' death.

In February 1997 a Compton police affidavit prepared to obtain search warrants for a gang raid was unsealed in Los Angeles. It alleged that informants had told Las Vegas and Compton detectives that Orlando Anderson was responsible for Shakur's murder. Apparently, the fight at the MGM Grand stemmed from a confrontation involving Anderson weeks earlier at a Lakewood, California mall. A group of seven or eight South-side Crips, Anderson among them, allegedly stole a gold Death Row pendant from Travon Lane, a Death Row associate and alleged member of the Mob Pirus, a Bloods set. Lane was with Tupac and Suge at the MGM Grand and may have pointed out Anderson. Lieutenant Wayne Petersen of the Metro Police Department in Las Vegas recently said about Shakur's murder: "We believe we know who is responsible for this. The problem is that we don't have anyone who will come forward to testify." Anderson has denied having any involvement in the murder. "I wish they would hurry up and catch the killer so my name could be cleared," he told the Los Angeles Times.

But do police have much interest in finding out who killed self-styled gangsters who rap about blowing away cops? Even internally, cops in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles have been wary of cooperating with police from other cities who appear to be on fishing expeditions--police who may be employed offduty as muscle by music companies and who are trying to extract information for their part-time employers.

Nearly two months after Shakur's death, Walter Johnson was arrested and charged on multiple counts related to three armed robberies in Brooklyn. The New York Daily News reported that investigators had identified him--though he has yet to be charged--as a suspect in the Quad Studios shooting. A confidential informant told them, "Johnson said Tupac is a sucker. He said Tupac is not a real gangster and that he shot him."

One police theory holds that Biggie died over a dispute--possibly related to an unpaid security bill--with a member of the Southside Crips. (Bad Boy denies it has ever hired gang members for security.) Biggie was reportedly hanging out with several Crips at a park in Compton the day of his death. Last May, Los Angeles detectives impounded a Chevy Impala that fit the description of the car used in the slaying of Biggie Smalls. The owner of the car is believed to be Dwayne Davis, Orlando Anderson's uncle. Davis, however, was never named as a suspect.

The Los Angeles Times' Chuck Philips reported that undercover federal agents from New York had apparently been tailing Christopher Wallace in the week before his death as part of an investigation of criminals allegedly connected to Bad Boy. (Criminal investigations of black-run labels seem to be pursued with more vigor than the murder investigations.) "Several law-enforcement agents may have witnessed the slaying, including one off-duty Inglewood police officer working security for the rap star's entourage," wrote Philips. Sources alleged that the officer, who was in a car behind Wallace's, had chased the assailant's vehicle but may have fled the scene without reporting his observations about the shooting to investigators.

•

"The cultural rot we are after shouldn't be thought of as a single piece of trash. It is an enormous pile of garbage. We took a shovelful and removed it from the mainstream with our campaign against Time Warner, but the battle over our culture is far from over." William Bennett

Delores Tucker, you's a motherfucker.

Instead of trying to help a nigger, You destroy a brother.

Tupac Shakur, How Do U Want It? (1996)

In 1994 William Bennett, the Bush administration's drug czar and subsequent head of Empower America, joined C. Delores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, in targeting Time Warner for its partial ownership of Interscope Records, which distributes Death Row. Bennett and Tucker also singled out Dre, Shakur and Snoop for producing music with "vulgar and misogynist lyrics that glorify violence." It was a blatant attempt to stem the spread of rap to the suburbs. Despite their efforts--or maybe because of the exposure they gave it--gangsta rap rose in sales.

"Another tripped-out thing is that people like C. Delores Tucker come out of the community," says Chuck D. "At first, she was talking about the companies. The corporations have the artists so brainwashed that the brainwashed artists start attacking the people who protect Tupac's hood. [Time Warner chairman] Gerald Levin actually protected Interscope--even in the middle of 'Rata-tat, never hesitate to put a nigger on his back.' The chicken's coming home to roost in a weird, fucked-up way. Levin's son was interactive with the black community at Taft High, where he was a teacher. He may have been killed by a former student, a young rap kid. Levin protected 'Rat-a-tat, never hesitate to put a nigger on his back' and he didn't give a fuck about being accountable to the community. A few years later this man loses a son to the same attitude that was on the records he put out."

In September 1995 Time Warner sold its 50 percent stake in Interscope. "These lyrics promoting drugs and murder were a pornographic pimple on their corporate countenance," Tucker later told The Washington Post. Time Warner's loss was initially Universal Records' gain. In early 1996 the label, a subsidiary of liquor giant Seagram, picked up half of the increasingly profitable Interscope for $200 million.

Still, Suge Knight's management muscle, not the label's artistic vision, finally got Death Row in trouble. The lurid tales surrounding Knight, a 315-pound hulk who has reputed ties to the Bloods, are legion. He once reportedly threatened a music executive and made him strip and walk naked. One record promoter claimed that Knight's associates tied him to a chair, beat him with broken champagne bottles and forced him to drink urine from a jar.

But Knight claims to have seen the light. In a rambling 15-minute speech during his sentencing hearing, Knight vowed, among other things, to increase his good works in the African American (concluded on page 207) Rap at the Crossroads (continued from page 204) community and never again to produce an album containing the word nigger.

His about-face may have come too late. Since Knight's incarceration, Death Row hasn't signed any significant new artists. Shakur's mother, Afeni, sued the label for back royalties. (She has also filed a wrongful-death suit against Orlando Anderson.) C. Delores Tucker filed a lawsuit against Shakur's estate, claiming that derogatory references to her on All Eyez on Me caused "great humiliation, mental pain and suffering" and caused her husband to "suffer a loss of advice, companionship and consortium." And more recently, a federal grand jury in California has been looking into whether convicted drug kingpin Michael Harris contributed $1.5 million in seed money to the label.

In August 1997 Billboard cited published reports that Seagram chief executive Edgar J. Bronfman Jr. was putting pressure on Interscope to sever its distribution deal with Death Row. But it's not so clear-cut as William Bennett would assert. "Let me assure you," notes Dave Marsh, "that Suge Knight's being in jail has nothing to do with cleaning up the music business or hip-hop."

I can still hear the shots that left my man

Big laying

On my knees, crying and praying. Then

I said, "God, why? Got to know how hard we try.

Don't let him die, please don't let my nigger be dead."

Puff Daddy, Pain (1997)

How will rap respond to the deaths of two of its biggest stars? To hear some tell it, the music's best days are over. Old school artists such as Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, Love Bug Starski and Rakim are held in great regard. But rap still shows plenty of promise. Cutting-edge artists such as Method Man, Cru and the Roots continue to breathe new life into the genre.

At its best, rap is about life, death, family, community, sex and survival. More often humorous than surly, more braggadocio than rage, rap remains a vital expression of urban America.

But we still hear reports of its demise. "At first, their deaths made a lot of us wonder, Can this be over?" says Danyel Smith of Vibe. "Then it reminded people of how strong the music and the culture must be to withstand the murders of two of its most prominent players. Can we live without hip-hop? I don't think we're ever going to have to."

"Ain't that Snoop Dogg over there?

Hey, man, roll up on the side of him, man.

Hand me my motherfucking Glock, man,

Give me another clip 'cause I'm gonna smoke this fool."

Snoop Doggy Dogg, Murder Was the Case (1993)

During Lollapalooza this past summer, Snoop Doggy Dogg dedicated shows to the memory of Shakur. During the tour, Snoop traveled in the Gangster Tank, a bulletproof aquamarine Chevy van (custom-built by Royal Motors in Beverly Hills for $140,000) complete with gun slits. And for protection on the ground, Snoop's armored division was augmented by a retinue of Nation of Islam bodyguards, the Swiss guard of rap.

After the death of Biggie Smalls, Puffy Combs redid his own album debut, No Way Out, to incorporate multiple tributes. One of those, a tepid R&B reworking of the Police's Every Breath You Take called I'll Be Missing You, went on to become 1997's number one single. But saccharine songs and schmaltzy melodies won't be rap's future. Having lost the engine of gangsta rap, hip-hop will get by until the "new flava" comes along. (It may already be here: Check out Bone Thugs' Art of War, J-Live's Can I Get It? or Suga Free's Street Gospel.) Let's hope Snoop can grow old and rich and ultimately irrelevant to street life, much in the way his predecessor Ice-T has done.

For now, talented women rappers such as Missy Elliott and Bahamadia are taking the lead in tempering rap's volatile rhythms with astute lyrics, actual melodies and sex.

"In a sad way, Puffy's the reigning champ," says Heavy D, who has known Combs since childhood. "He's a very spiritual person. Puff is a good guy. Puff ain't never been a punk, you know. He's a hustler. He went to college and learned to throw parties. He's got that brilliant energy."

"In life, both Biggie and Tupac were brilliant, talented individuals," says Vibe's Smith. "But in death they were typical: They were black men in their 20s who were shot to death."

"I don't believe people get killed because of rap music," says Lil' Kim. "But I have been unable to celebrate the success of my album because of all the terrible things that have been going on. I'm still friends with Snoop and Lady of Rage--there are a lot of other people on the West Side that I'm friends with. But I don't know what the future holds."

Rap, of course, will survive. It has outlived previous reports of its death. The genre is much bigger than any two or three artists. People in the media don't know how to digest changes in rap music, so they resort to familiar, if reductionist, notions. The way the media deal with rap is to make it appear as if it's about to end in a blaze of gunfire. "Rap music is rap over music," says Chuck D. "So asking rap to disappear is like saying singing will stop." Gangsta rap may be played out. But rap itself is here to stay, perhaps merely as an evolutionary step to the next big thing. Some people don't like it, but it's an unstoppable form of music that has risen (like jazz and rock) from the street. No effort to demonize it can succeed, because beyond the sensationalism, a strong music survives.

Success demanded that you be authentic--a difficult position to maintain if you're driving a Bentley.