Word: shakur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Never mind the furor over the murder of rap star Tupac Shakur and the recriminations that are sure to erupt over the civil trial of a certain ex-football player. The hottest topic in black America, bar none, is whether the CIA was responsible for introducing crack cocaine to the ghetto. This idea is, of course, a hardy perennial among conspiracy theorists, who blame every plague that afflicts the black community on racist government plots. But this time it is not so easy to write off the talk as paranoid mumbo jumbo for two reasons: it springs, for once, from...
...former pro-football player, is an intimidating figure to some--and Death Row, whose roster of artists includes Snoop Doggy Dogg, is a driving force in the controversial genre of gangsta rap. Knight was behind the wheel of the BMW in which Tupac Shakur, a rapper on his label, was riding when he was fatally shot on Sept. 7 in Las Vegas...
...death of Shakur, who sold more than 10 million albums, constitutes a defining nightmare for a gangsta-rap world whose paranoid royalty seem increasingly compelled to live out the grotesque violence that fills its art. Many initially connected the murder to the rapper's vocal participation in an ugly feud between his California record label, Death Row, and its East Coast competitor, Bad Boy. It was Death Row president Marion ("Suge") Knight who was driving his black BMW after the Tyson fight, with Shakur standing up through the sun roof. Four men rolled up in a white Cadillac, fired about...
...Shakur was born in New York City into a nobility of violence: his mother, a Black Panther, was jailed on a bombing charge while she was pregnant with him, although she was later acquitted. His father was shot and killed when Tupac was a child. Their son, meanwhile, wrote sensitive poetry while attending the High School of Performing Arts in Baltimore, Maryland. Shakur never entirely ceased extolling black womanhood or elders. Increasingly, however, such lyrics were shouldered aside by the bitches and cop-killing bullets of gangstaism. The dominant persona, says rap reporter Larry Hester, was "a villain, a joker...
Then the artist regressed into his character. Shakur carried a gun and shot at people. He escaped conviction on a series of assault charges, but a 1993 sexual-abuse complaint stuck. He arrived for sentencing in a wheelchair; days earlier, he had been shot five times in a Manhattan "robbery" he regarded as a failed hit. Out on appeal last October, he sought protection under the wing of the massive, much feared Knight, who was deeply embroiled in his feud with Bad Boy and the East. In two years the conflict had moved far beyond artistic issues to beatings...