Word: shakur
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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...
Indeed, in the wake of Wallace's death, as with Shakur's, records bearing his name sold out in stores nationwide; the new CD is expected to be a hot seller. Americans have long been drawn to the 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...
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...
...generations. The fates of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrision were representative of the pitfalls of a drug culture; Kurt Cobain's suicide exemplified the nihilistic and selfdestructive elements of the so-called Generation X. Biggie's slaying, especially because it was so closely preceded by the death of Tupac Shakur, is indicative of a hip-hop culture that is too often obsessed with mindless violence and senseless killings...
Jones--whose daughter, Kidada Jones, had been engaged to Shakur and came close to being in the car in which the rap artist was killed--said the "gangsta" element in rap music was more theatrical than political and should be abandoned...