Tupac
Shakur: a fiery ferocious MC, an auspicious actor, a man so
beautiful he made you wanna touch the screen, the
photograph, him. He made you wanna see those vanilla teeth,
the wet sweet wild eyes, the fleshy lips, the lashes like
fans like feathers on his fudgy skin. He made you want to
kill him, defend him, make him your baby. He dared you to
find the lies, to prove he's crazy. Tupac keeps you
searching, even now, for the line between him and the him he
put out there for you to see, for the line between being and
acting, between how one rolls through life and how one rocks
the microphone. Crazy motherfucker. Coward. Sucker. Sexist.
Sex symbol. Superman. Provocateur. Hero.
He's another hero we don't need, and 'Pac's built, in death even, to last. From the start, his life was made-for-mythologizing, shrouded as it was in the tragedy of the Black Panther party. Because of his mother's affiliation with the group, Tupac's early existence was mingled with the plain logic of breakfast for everyone, in the ballsy resolve of guns in California's state capital, in the glamour and fraternity of leather pea-coats and tams for any brother wanting to stand up and fight--or look ferocious and fab. And Tupac's adult biography has everything--money, music, movies, malfeasance--that makes us love and hate someone. No matter what wrong shit he was ever caught up in, he always had his other raised-by-Panthers/fuck-tha-police self to fall back on.
Tupac's five albums are equal parts striking and adequate. His dramatic (on-screen) performances were promising here and cartoony there. He never quite lived up to the brilliance of his Bishop in Ernest Dickerson's 1992 Juice. Onstage, his performances were spotty. Tupac, like many MCs, rode his own dick, seeming to care more about how he was coming off to his boys backstage than he did about the average Negro who paid to stand up in a hot club and catch 'Pac's fever for a moment.
Tupac's different lives were very much in league, though; none would have been vibrant without the others. He managed them, like he managed his blackness--with a fantastic, desperate dexterity. Like most American heroes, Tupac Shakur had glide in his stride, big guns, and leather holsters. But his life was about juggling plums while bullets nipped at his ankles. It was about defiance, women, paranoia, ego, and anger--and going out in a blaze of what he imagined to be glory.
n the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tupac Shakur
was chiseling out an existence in Marin City, California's
craggy slums. Oakland was known as Coke-Land back then, and
though it was a bridge or two away from Marin, Tupac got
over to the East Bay a lot, first hanging with his half
brother Mocedes and a crew known as Strictly Dope, then with
this white girl, Leila Steinberg, from Sonoma County, who
was managing him, and then with the droll brothers who made
up Digital Underground.
To what degree it is true
will probably go forever untold, but the rise of the Bay
Area dope game and Bay Area hip hop were massively
intertwined. (Actual gangsters, their stacks of cash, and
the music business have been linked since kids in the 1940s
gave music a real economy.) It's no coincidence that as the
crack cocaine market exploded, people like DU, Too Short,
and MC Hammer blew up--as well as lesser-known talents like
MC Ant, Ant Banks, K-Cloud & the Crew, Premo, and
Capitol Tax. The Oakland Police Department Drug Task Force
was using battering rams to bust down the doors of dope 
houses
back then. Kids were getting a gross kind of paid while
Highland Hospital yanked bullets from bodies. There seemed a
ceaseless stream of mothers, groggy with grief, wailing on
the news about a good child who was dead. MCs and
songwriters responded to the havoc crack was wreaking on the
East Bay.
Hammer's contribution was the innocuous "Pray," but Tony Toni Toné went to the soul of the matter with 1988's "Little Walter," an ode to a dope dealer who gets shot upon opening his front door. Club Nouveau's 1986 "Situation #9" (a Top 10 R&B hit) was another admonition: "The life that you're living / Is gonna catch up to you / And boy, I think you need some help." The immense vocals balanced the paranoid lyrics, and that chemistry may have inspired Tupac to ask Roniece Livias to sing in the background (along with David Hollister, who would go on to sing lead in the first incarnation of Teddy Riley's BLACKstreet) of his debut single, 1991's "Brenda's Got a Baby."
Tupac's "Brenda" deserts her newborn, sells dope, then sex, and ends up (in the video for the song) the silent star of a crime scene. He came to kick it with the DU crew one night on a plush Sausalito houseboat Jimi "Chopmaster J" Dright had rented while recording an album under the name Force One Network for Qwest Records. The bay rocked us softly while we listened to "Brenda's Got a Baby" three or four times. Tupac held on to a frayed piece of ruled paper with the lyrics.
"No, she ain't somebody I know," he answered somebody's question. Tupac curled himself forward and laughed. "Y'all some simple muthafuckas," he said. "She's one a them girls we all know." He was 20, I think. The verse he rapped on DU's 1991 "Same Song" had been like a single french fry for a growing boy: "Now I clown around / When I hang around / With the Underground." Tupac felt he had more to say. His then-manager, Atron Gregory, was unable to convince Tommy Boy's Monica Lynch of Tupac's potential, but Interscope saw dollar signs in Tupac's worldview, and put up the dough so Tupac could have his say.
It all came out of him in 2Pacalypse Now (1991), the words of a boy weary of doing the "Humpty Dance," and tired of standing on the corner in Marin City, selling weed. All the best songs on that album--"Young Black Male," "Rebel of the Underground," and the unwavering "Trapped," with Shock in the back murmuring "Nah / You can't keep the black man down"--are rank with the funk of a young man cooped up too long in somebody else's concept. 2Pacalypse didn't sound like a DU spin-off because while the Underground Railroad production squad stuck with the liquid bassiness that had succeeded for Digital, they also went for a sound more incensed, impassioned, broken, and hateful. They added some Tupac.
Tupac's MC skills were just coming together back then. His words, especially in "Brenda," are over-enunciated and urgent. His writing, though, was clear and picturesque. Brenda was "in love with a molester / Who's sexing her crazy." And when Tupac says "Prostitute found slain / And Brenda's her name / She's got a baby," with Hollister and Roniece battling out in the background, moaning and repeating the name Brenda over and over, the song is bold and melancholy--a crystalline morality tale. The line "She didn't know what to throw away / And what to keep," especially in the way Tupac hurls it out, consonants sharp and hard, says more about a young woman's angry bewilderment with life than some of the most adored female MCs ever have.
It was right before the release of 2Pacalypse Now that Tupac, while in New York with Digital Underground, went to an audition with Ronald "Money-B" Brooks. Mun read before Ernest Dickerson, but didn't get called back. Tupac, who said he went along "just to trip," ended up being cast opposite costar Omar Epps's tormented Q as Bishop in Juice. While the training Tupac received during his high-school years at Baltimore's School for the Arts no doubt emerged at the unscheduled audition, the way he hustled himself into the reading demonstrated a kind of alertness to opportunity that can't be taught in the classroom.
In the film, Tupac and Epps battle it out for most lovely--both of them black as truth with brown eyes, matching each other stare for stare. Q wants "juice," but the kind Bishop gets drunk on is too corrosive. Bishop has killed Raheem, one of his best friends, and at the funeral, his easy duplicity is marrow-freezing. And later, when Q, trying to get his life back together, slams his locker shut only to find Bishop standing there, it's a vision of one hellborn. The movie house gasps were loud and in unison. "It's over," says Bishop. "Ain't nothin' nobody can do about it now." And like so many of the words that came out of Tupac's mouth which seemed to predict his end, they provide a peek into his state of mind. "You know what?" he says. "I am crazy."
Tupac played Bishop-as-bogeyman ingeniously. Dickerson placed him throughout Juice as a cloaked figure--at one point Bishop's red hood is pulled over his head, his face turned away from the camera, a fiend more likely to battle the X-Men than three of his buddies in Harlem. Tupac depicts Bishop's coldness as a hopelessness he finally submits to, even if it means embracing depravity. "You gotta get the ground beneath your feet, get the wind behind your back," says Bishop, after watching James Cagney get shot in Public Enemy. "And go out in a blaze of glory if you got to. Otherwise you might as well be dead your damn self." At the end of the film, to the strains of Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man," Q can't hold on to Bishop any longer. Bishop is hanging off the side of a building, Q holding on while he can. "Hold on, Bishop!" Q manages to say, then Bishop is gone--with us calling after him.
n 1991, Public Enemy was still the best band hip
hop ever birthed. Touring with Anthrax, they came to the
Calvin Simmons Auditorium in Oakland on October 20, the day
that the Oakland Hills were burning down to the dirt. Smoke
hung over the whole city, ashes fell to the ground like tiny
gray snowflakes. Authorities were asking citizens to stay
off the roads. Would the PE concert go on? Would Digital
Underground roll to the show even though the condominium
complex that housed three of the group's members was now
among the ashes falling from the sky?
The mood backstage was bleak. This was only a few weeks before Juice came out, and somebody'd told me earlier in the day that Tupac had gotten in trouble with the police the day before, had gotten his ass beat in the middle of Oakland's tiny downtown. I saw him backstage, from across a long room, and he looked great. He was talking to someone; I could see his profile, and I knew that the story must have been exaggerated. I walked over to tell him what I'd heard and that he looked fine, and when I got up on him and his whole face was in my face I saw that the other side was puffed and scabby, his eye was swollen, there were scratches and small dents on his forehead--but just on the one side.
He laughed when he saw the expression on my face and gave me back his profile. "You like that better?" he said, with his usual toothy smile. "Nope!" he said, showing me his whole face again. "You gotta look! Look! Those motherfuckers had me on the ground and they bashed my head into the sidewalk over and over. On some bullshit! Hear me? Mad 'cause I had a check for seven grand in my wallet. I'ma sue 'em, though. Watch me." And he just kept on like that, talking to everybody, real regular, no bandages. One side of him flawless, the other ruined as the hills in flames behind us.
"Holler If Ya Hear Me," produced by Randy "Stretch" Walker of Live Squad, is the best track (and it was never a single) Tupac Shakur ever recorded. It's the first number on 1993's Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., and it barrels at you, churning and fired up. "'Cause I'm black born / I'm supposed to say `peace' / Sing songs / And get capped on?" The lines are juicy with testosterone, every one rolling right into the next. "Pump! Pump! if you're pissed / At the sellouts living it up / One way or another / They'll be giving it up." He's going fast with the lyrics, the song revved up on the intoxicating, pretend energy that comes from saying what you want when you know it's only about itself, not about what really happens, or about what you're really going to do. But still, it feels divine.
"Oh, no / I won't turn the other cheek." And it's like, yes. Can we not turn the other fucking cheek? Can we revel at the blood heating up our hearts when we hear a black person espousing that? "I love it when they fear me," says 'Pac, and how lovely is that feeling when you have always been in fear? Tupac emits fat zaps of musical electricity--they first rouse, then dull, then burn.
Tupac, with "Holler," dispensed a buccaneer spirit--bandanna'd men, fancy women, romance, mutiny. It's what gangsta rap was about at its N.W.A. beginnings: no more Mr. Nice Guy. Let's be defiant in our songs and we'll feel, if not actually be, free. We'll feel a part of the patriarchal club--every line of a good gangsta rap song being a warm hand on a soft dick, after all. And as usual, too-passive girls get the (sensual) benefit and pay the (political and spiritual) cost. Surrounded by rock nostalgia, hip hop fans believe that music "changed the world" before, so it can change the world again. Every time someone new arrives--Chuck D,
Ice-T, Arrested Development's Speech, anyone from the Wu-Tang Clan--and dares to state what he (and it's always a he) thinks about the world, blacks get hopeful, whites get excited, and then when things stay the same, everyone feels betrayed.
It was around this time he was arrested for shooting two off-duty cops on October 31, 1993, in Atlanta. Shooting cops? And living to tell the story? And beating the rap? He was beyond real. He rhymed about shooting people, and getting shot, and he lived it in real life, and he played it on film. He filled the hero spot in a way someone like Eazy-E never could, because Eazy wasn't easy to look at and Eazy never talked about his mama or any other female like he loved her.
"Keep Ya Head Up" was the gold single that carried Strictly to platinum status. The song contains a riff from the Five Stairsteps' "O-o-h Child," and vocals from the same Dave Hollister (credited this time as the "Black Angel") who contributed so mightily to "Brenda's Got a Baby." On each of Tupac's albums, he included at least one song that illuminated the side of himself that believed in good. "I wanna give a holler to my sisters on welfare," he says in "Head Up." "Tupac cares if don't nobody else care." Uplifting, pro-choice, and anti-abuse, "Keep Ya Head Up," "Dear Mama," and "Brenda" are the "good" songs, the ones that make Tupac unassailable in the eyes of his fans. "Head Up," especially, is used like shield and sword to defend him.
Tupac tells women he knows they're "Dying inside / But outside you're looking fierce." It's a little saccharine at points, yes, but as "Head Up"'s chart success proved, by this time, Tupac Shakur could say "Keep hope alive" over a decent loop and sell mega units. Tupac was smart enough to risk feeling and appearing "positive." (The song gave someone like Nas, for instance, nerve enough to do a song like "If I Ruled the World [Imagine That]" in 1996.) As author Reverend Michael Eric Dyson might put it, Tupac Shakur knew to give us a little God with our gangsta rap.
Tupac was at his best on Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., still touched by Digital Underground's mischeivous aura but standing on his own two feet, not yet doing time on Death Row. On "Representin' 93," Tupac names the brothers he loves--and in 1993, he was still referring to DU as his "real niggaz." "I Get Around" was pretty much a Digital Underground song with Tupac on lead. Listen and you can almost hear Shock-G in the studio telling 'Pac to lighten up a little bit--take a swim, have some sex, go platinum, live a little. Tupac was on his way to being deified or dead or both, is what everyone said. We watched him in his black Versace, knowing exactly which was correct.
n 1993's Poetic Justice Tupac is bald, extra slew-footed, and wears
a huge nose ring. He looks pretty, but it doesn't matter
because Regina King steals the movie from him, Janet
Jackson, and Joe Torry. Much was made of Tupac playing a
Regular Guy, not someone like Bishop, who was closer to what
people believed to be Tupac's "real" personality, and
therefore easy to play. He succeeded to a large degree,
considering John Singleton's banal story line. What hurt the
film most was the coldness between Shakur and Jackson. She'd
requested he take an HIV test before she would even kiss
him, and the sizzle, if there had been any, was
imperceptible on the screen. In truth, Tupac wasn't easy
around girls in his films or in his videos. There was
bravado and awkwardness, but little smoothness.
Because of creative
differences and attitude contradictions, Tupac got booted
from Allen and Albert Hughes's Menace II Society and then Singleton's Higher Learning. Burning bridges all over 
Hollywood's colored
section, Tupac ended up in Above the Rim (1994), playing a murderous gangsta
basketball scout. In the film, Tupac's bandannas coordinate
with his every outfit, neatly folded and painstakingly
pressed. He's like Doris Day at the beginning of 1959's
Pillow
Talk, perfectly
dressed and bonneted and ready to rumble.
Tupac's character, Birdie, was flimsily written, but Tupac fully dramatized the deadness of soul certain killers must have. As in Juice, there are moments in Rim when Tupac captures the calm of bitter people who've been kicked when they were defenseless, the confidence that comes with constantly intimidating people. He does casual evil as deftly as John Malkovich, tells you all about Hades with his fringed eyes.
Above the Rim has its happy ending (Duane Martin's character goes to Georgetown on a basketball scholarship) but there's also Birdie's violent comeuppance. Marlon Wayans's character, Bugaloo, at the end of the film, raises a pistol to shoot Birdie. Tupac's mouth turns down in a sneer as the bullet hits him. He's pushed back, and his arms fly up over his head. In slow motion, Birdie looks like a spirit has entered him, or like he's pouring himself, in spurts, into some lover.
he spring Tupac was incarcerated--acquitted of
sodomy and weapons charges, guilty of sexual abuse--his
third album, Me
Against the World
(1995) was released, and debuted at number one on
Billboard's pop and R&B album charts. "Dear Mama," about
Tupac's troubled but loving relationship with his mother,
proved a perfect antidote to the charges. Particularly in a
moment when some were beginning to wonder, If he didn't rape
that girl in the hotel, why didn't he help her? Did he
really nap through a gangbang? Why didn't he denounce his
buddies like the guy who wonders, in "Keep Ya Head Up," "Why
we take from our women / Why we rape our women / Why we hate
our women"?
"Dear Mama," along with Tupac's appearance in court, bandaged and weak from the five bullets he took in the lobby of a New York City recording studio, smoothed his rough edges and filled in his story. And he didn't spend much time in jail, either. Tupac Shakur was rescued, like a true innocent, from New York's Clinton Correctional Facility.
Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight secured a bond for $1.4 million so Tupac could jet to southern California and begin recording what became the twenty-seven-song album All Eyez on Me. Tupac was entrenched in the Death Row camp by 1994, his production strictly L.A.-style. Tupac told me he couldn't deal with Atron Gregory "apologizing for him," and by 1995, Tupac was being managed by Suge himself, and had gone from being signed to Jimmy Iovine's Interscope to being signed to its subsidiary, Knight's Death Row Records.
Hip hop's first double album, All Eyez on Me went on to sell seven million units. Death Row cofounder and house producer Dr. Dre and Suge Knight were starting to fall out by the time Tupac began recording, and Dre produced only two tracks for All Eyez, one of them being the huge hit "California Love." Dre and Tupac trade verses, and Zapp's Roger Troutman, with his jheri curl and electronic voicebox still intact, makes the chorus unforgettable.
The rest of the album is mostly, to use one of Tupac's favorite words, simple. On "All About U," 'Pac, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nate Dogg, and Dru Down chime in over a tinny sample of Cameo's "Candy." All of them, Tupac included, spit out labels for women--shitty-ass ho', hoochie--and one of them (doesn't matter who) says, "Is you sick from the dick / Or is it the flu?" Great sexist songs like Raekwon's "Ice Cream," DJ Quik's "Sweet Black Pussy," and even Too Short's grotesque "Freaky Tales" have either silliness or genuineness or art at their core. They seduce with inspired beats and intriguing chauvinisms. Many of the ditties on All Eyez are repulsive not only because the production is tired, but because the misogynist themes are weak, and break under the pressure of two or three listens. You can't even respect them for their intensity, let alone be offended or scared.
And it's not like everything has to be about peer marriages or keeping your head up. Tupac is at his most alluring on All Eyez's "How Do U Want It?" Words like "Tell me / Is it cool to fuck?" tumble from his mouth like dice. "Holla at Me" packs none of the same punch as "Holler If Ya Hear Me," but the last two songs on All Eyez on Me reflect 'Pac's fight-and-fuck, love-and-hate, boast-and-beg dichotomies. "Ain't Hard 2 Find" is 'Pac, E-40, B-Legit, C-Bo, and Richie Rich acting like he-men. If you wanna fight, I'm right here, is what these California soul brothers are saying. "Heaven Ain't Hard 2 Find," on the other hand, is Tupac at his macho sweetest, creating a scene complete with Alizé and "moonlight mist."
"We'll be best friends," he almost sings to his intended, "I'll be the thug in your life." Tupac sympathizes with his lover's hesitancy (if she wasn't hesitant, she'd be a hoochie in another song). Then he says "Love me for my thug nature," sounding foolish at first, but then desolate, and in the end, profoundly sad.
n Bullet, it's Mickey Rourke, as a bandanna'd white
cholo, who's constantly getting in touch with his thug
nature. The film opens with Rourke riding away from prison
in a blue convertible with Barry White playing in the
background. Tupac sports an eye patch, and rides around in
the back of a limo slicing a mango with a switchblade,
looking like somebody snatched him off the set of one of his
own video shoots. Watching Bullet is like getting teeth
pulled without Novocain while listening to the post-Lionel
Richie Commodores. Tupac and Rourke look loaded most of the
time (even when there's no need for them to) and reek of a
desperation totally detached from their characters.
Bullet never made it to the cineplexes, and is easily forgotten in the face of Gridlock'd, a flat, goofy, good film Tupac starred in with Tim Roth, which was released six months after Tupac's death. When Tupac, as the heroin-addicted Spoon, says "Somehow I don't think this was my mother's dream for me," squinting as the drug dances through his blood, "Dear Mama" suddenly sounds less like an image Band-Aid. Spoon is a bass player/poet on the spoken word scene, and at the end, when he's kicked, and he raps a corny rhyme about life being like a traffic jam, he carries it off, but you can't imagine Tupac ever recording anything like that in real life, ever. The songs he recorded right before he was shot dead in Las Vegas bear no resemblance to anything in Gridlock'd.
The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996) is dreary because Tupac was no longer here when it came out, and powerful only in the quickest and most tragic ways. Tupac--rather, "Makaveli" as an ominous voice states--says in "Bomb First" that he's got "Thug Life running through my veins on strong." Then he chants, and it's pitiful, "West coast ridah / Comin' up behind ya / Shoulda neva fucked wit' me." No? Well, they did, and now you're dead.
But dead or not, the mighty "Hail Mary" is one of Tupac's better songs (though in an attempt to sound ominous, Tupac sounds much like Shaquille O'Neal on the mike). "Come wit' me / (Hail Mary, nigga) / Run quick see . . . Do you wanna ride or die?" "White Man'z World" is 'Pac's usual shout-out to the sisters. In "Against All Odds," Tupac disrespects Mobb Deep, Nas, and Sean "Puffy" Combs, like he did so fervently in "Hit 'Em Up," a base diatribe/revenge fantasy Death Row released in June 1996. "I knew you niggas from way back," he says in "Odds" when he's not spitting out more spiteful disses about their personal skills ("Nas / Your shit is bitten"). In the song, Tupac is consumed with other people wanting and stealing his style, his life, his way of being.
Tupac, especially on his first two albums, considered himself blameless, made it clear, especially before he got down with Death Row and the whole L.A. ridah scene, that his life was not his fault. In Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z's "Strugglin'" he says "Some call me crazy / But this is what you gave me." In that same album's "Pac's Theme (Interlude)," Tupac answers a pseudo-reporter's question, "I was raised in this society / So there's no way you can expect me to be a perfect person / I'ma do what I'ma do." He always did believe, or at least believed strongly when I knew him, that to be crazy in this world was to be normal, that to get along well in a place so inherently unfair was to have eaten yourself alive and then be living on the shit that you pushed out afterward.
Tupac made people uncomfortable. At his best, he called blacks and whites alike out on their complicity in a despicable system. He made thuggery-as-resistance appealing, urged us to be loud and wild and reckless. He was not trying to "rise above" the way things are. He was not trying to "be better." No one ever said what would happen if folks got tired of aspiring to dignity; Tupac showed one way it already is. "I love it when they fear me," he said. But more truly, he loved not fearing them. He was free when he didn't give a fuck about anything, including continuing his own life, when he felt like the world--for a change--was his.
Wasn't Tupac great when he wasn't getting shot up? Or accused of rape? Wasn't he just the best when he wasn't falling for Suge Knight's lame-ass lines and dying broke? Couldn't Tupac just have been your everything? He got you fired up, excited and hopeful about something you couldn't even name, then had you crying in the end for a smooth-skinned young man in a coffin, like always. But you wish him back for one more song, one more standoff with the cops, more jail time, more anything. You wish back the bright spectacle that was Tupac Amaru Shakur's noisy sad life. Short life. Thug life. Triple life. Afterlife.
The last sound on The Don Killuminati is that of bullets popping off. Helicopter blades beat the air into a small, inside-out tornado. Tupac is dead in the street. Blood everywhere. Police clearing the scene. Thug niggas stand on the periphery, girls cry. Commentators report the shooting of "Tupack Shaker." He's dead, they say, dancing from star to star at night, diving into Hell's seething sewers at dawn. Tupac bathes on Sundays in the tears we cry for him, wades like a slave through that troubled water.
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