Word: rapped
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...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...
...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...
...Rap started as a form of verbal jousting--good-natured wordplay. Gangsta rap, with its themes of low riding and thuggery, raised the stakes. Now, a record-label president says, "a lot of the people who are the new players are coming from the drug trade or gang-related backgrounds. I myself have had death threats...
...York would not confirm or deny this.) The alleged FBI presence has some seeing conspiracy. Mutulu Shakur, ex-husband of Tupac Shakur's mother, says the FBI is trying to create a "rift" between East Coast and West Coast rappers. "Whether we accept it or not, the rap groups are a movement," says Mutulu, who is serving a 60-year sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta for his role in an armored-car robbery in 1981. "The wrath of the government has come to descend on the rap industry...