Word: gangstas
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...some pounds of him, grown up and successful. Back in the day, he had been just another fat kid, a no-account who couldn't get girls, couldn't finish high school, slinging crack for near nothing on a street corner in Brooklyn. Then he discovered gangsta rap. His first album, Ready to Die, sold more than a million copies, and his follow-up, Life After Death, scheduled to drop on March 25, was the talk of the rap world. Wallace had already landed the cover of the hip-hop magazine the Source, and he was set to have lunch...
...gangsta rap song. More than 1,700 people crowded into the Peterson Automotive Museum, where the party was being held, and the crush was too much. Around midnight the fire marshal ordered the festivities shut down. Wallace went to his truck. A friend took the wheel of the GMC Suburban, and the rapper got into the passenger seat (he didn't have a driver's license). Moments after they left the parking lot, according to witnesses, a lone gunman in a passing car fired several shots from a 9-mm handgun through the passenger side of the vehicle, hitting...
Wait. Haven't we heard this story before? Is this the remix? It was just six months ago that Tupac Shakur, one of the West Coast's most charismatic and popular gangsta rappers, was slain in a similar drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Now Wallace, one of the East Coast's biggest rap stars, is dead too. Like Shakur, Biggie had foretold his own demise. On the dirgelike song You're Nobody, from his forthcoming CD, he raps, "You're nobody/ Till somebody kills...
...symbiosis between criminal life and pop culture--from Frank Sinatra and his alleged mobster pals to the success of the Godfather saga, which is scheduled for an anniversary re-release this week, to the fact that John Gotti's daughter has a new novel out. In the case of gangsta rap, however, the music, though often purchased by suburban whites, is primarily identified with a segment of society, young black males, that is particularly ravaged by crime. Is gangsta mythologizing for people already living under the gun a form of release or cultural imprisonment...
Others are calling for an end to gangsta rap. After Shakur's murder, Minister Conrad Muhammad of the Nation of Islam held a hip-hop summit in Harlem to encourage nonviolence. Now he wants to go further. "There needs to be one more murder," he says. "Gangsta rap needs to be murdered. [It] is absolutely genocidal. [It] holds out no hope. The lyrics can become like drugs, almost like a narcotic in a young person's life. We need rap. It's a critical vehicle for youth to express themselves. But the negativity is destroying what these young rappers have...