No post-mortem

Why gangsta rap didn't die with Tupac Shakur

by Franklin Soults

Tupac Shakur's drive-by murder last month fulfilled the trajectory of his gangsta rap career so perfectly that almost nobody could resist the tidy moral it offered. The New York Times served it up in a simple parallelism in the headline of its page-one obituary: "Tupac Shakur, 25, Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies." More explicit was a mural by artist Andre Charles that appeared on Houston Street in Manhattan a few hours after Shakur expired from four gunshot wounds to the chest. "R.I.P. Tupac," it read, "Live by the gun, die by the gun."

A photo of that mural was quickly picked up by everyone from Entertainment Weekly to the Village Voice. As Natasha Stovall noted in the Voice, the phrase overnight became a "touchstone . . . for both his sympathizers and his condemners, assuming a double meaning. Depending on which side of the coin was up, Tupac's death was either an eye for an eye, or the spectacular finale of a socially fueled vortex of self-destruction." In both sides of this double judgment there was an air of logical closure, of acceptance. It might seem to make more sense that his told-you-so condemners would adopt that attitude, but his fatalistic supporters simply saw it as part of the harsh natural law of retribution that takes over the streets when society's laws cease to function.

Throughout his short, burning career Tupac made it clear he understood and honored that natural law even as he courted its irrevocable final penalty. "I'm suicidal, so don't stand near me," he rapped with sad acceptance on "So Many Tears": "My every move is a calculated step/To bring me closer to embrace an early death/Now there's nothing left." That 1995 track appeared on Me Against the World (Interscope), a release I found deeply moving for its tortured exploration of how gangbanging was an inevitable route for young black men like himself. According to Tupac, they had to roll with their set or else they would betray everyone they knew, everything that made them who they were. For some critics, this attitude was just "American tough-guy sentimentality" jacked up several notches into "rank self-pity" (Robert Christgau). Standing from the outside looking in at the facts of Shakur's life now that it's over, you can find more than enough justification to side with all those major media commentators who felt little remorse about his murder.

If nothing else, Shakur certainly had more choice about living the thug life than he pretended. As a teen, he was together enough to stay out of trouble until he became famous. He even attended Baltimore's prestigious High School of the Performing Arts. Only when he had it all did he start throwing it away. Excluding the 1993 shootout with two cops that may well have been justified (they were said to have been roughing up a friend and to have shot first), he was involved in the accidental shooting death of a six-year-old, convicted for beating up film director Alan Hughes, and finally sent to jail for holding down a woman while some friends sodomized her.

After the sodomy trial came the torment of Me Against the World, but that proved short-lived. When Death Row owner Suge Knight appeared on the scene to free the poor boy from prison with a bond of $1.4 million, Tupac eagerly joined Knight's organization, the most notorious gangsta-rap label in the business. His Death Row debut, All Eyez on Me, marked the ex-con's joyous return to bitch bashing and gun waving as he teamed up with a bevy of the most notorious gangsta rappers on the West Coast, including Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Tha Dogg Pound. Rap's very first #1 double album, it charted at number one the first week of its release this spring and moved five million copies before it started to slip. (Tupac's murder, however, catapulted it back from No. 69 to No. 18 on the September 26 Billboard Top 200.) While he was still celebrating the success of this album, he was caught riding with Suge in Vegas by a Cadillac bearing four unknown assailants. Immediately before that, he had reportedly been observed "beating and stomping" an unidentified man in a casino.

These facts make it tempting to accede to muralist Charles's aphorism with a loud amen. Yet neither the facts nor the aphorism tell the whole story of Shakur's murder. To end there is to succumb to the instinctive but misguided feeling that his death was somehow just. Accept that verdict and you lose sense of the social relations that made his fate not completely his own no matter how smart or despicable or self-pitying or filthy rich he may have been.

It was telling that immediately after Shakur's death, the only place you could readily find extended discussions and two-sided tributes were on urban contemporary radio stations and other black-identified media -- a fact that says less about Tupac's popularity than it does about the current place of hip-hop in the larger culture. Without doubt, rap has been the most influential musical genre of the past 15 years, yet for at least a third of that time the music has been steadily marginalized by hardcore performers like Tupac. Despite the sales figures, rap has lost its broad cultural impact and now affects only itself and its own fans rather than pop culture at large. Everything from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to TV ads and Top 40 to other musical styles used to reflect hip-hop's influence. Now when the Chili Peppers or Beck borrow rap, it's decidedly Old School. It may seem odd that performers who spend their whole lives trying to live as large as possible should also struggle mightily to limit the appeal of their product, yet whether it's the bad buzz of Wu-Tang Clan-influenced East Coast rap, the smooth nastiness of Tupac's West Coast style, or any of the shifting permutations in between, this contradiction is seen as the price you pay for "keepin' it real."

For Tupac, of course, the price turned out to be a lot higher than that. The question now raging in the wake of his death is whether the cost of "real" is far too high for hip-hop in general. A steadily increasing group of disillusioned fans like myself have long thought the answer obvious. Beneath the self-destructive lifestyles and the lyrics that are occasionally racist, often homophobic, and almost always misogynistic and violent, "real" has crippled the music's aesthetic possibilities. It has served only to harden hip-hop's bunker mentality with elitist delusions, sterile uniformity, and the kind of cliquish intolerance that infests the most moribund subcultures.

And yet despite all that, there's no denying that "real" serves a purpose as code for blackness. It hardly matters whether or not all these artists have lived the gangbanging life to the extent that they claim; the details of what they're saying aren't as important as the fact that they're demonstrating solidarity with a community that shares their hardness, alienation, and anger. As long as the average black child lives in poverty and grows up with a far greater chance of being shot or sent to prison than of going to college, there will always be plenty of home-grown consumers and producers for deviant styles like gangsta.

And there's more to it than that. As was brought up by speakers in the hastily arranged "Hip-Hop Day of Atonement" organized by the Nation of Islam in Harlem two weeks ago, the "realness" issue is also supported to a large extent by a white infrastructure. The revisionist cant that hip-hop isn't "really black" grossly overstates the issue, but statistics do suggest that the greatest number of hip-hop consumers are indeed whites. One reason whites flock to this music is that, unlike dance or R&B, rap completely conforms to the rock-and-roll concepts of rebellion and authenticity -- in short, its performers live out the roles they play on stage. The Nation of Islam may have their own warped agenda, but they're right when they claim that negative stereotypes are encouraged in the industry because they meet the expectations of white consumers.

"If it's real, let somebody else represent it," Shakur told Vibe magazine a year and a half ago. But the color of his skin, the needs of the industry, the desire to get out of jail, the friends he never knew he had, all of it compelled him to renege. Much more recently, he told station KMEL in San Francisco, "You know how they say, `You've made your bed, now lie in it'? I tried to move. I can't move to no other bed. This is it."

Lately there has been a small musical surge pushing away from gangsta's red tide in the charts. It can be heard in artists and groups like the solid post-gangsta rapper Nas, the wildly successful crossover act the Fugees, even the return of A Tribe Called Quest. But looking down the same Billboard chart in which Tupac jumped 40 places, there's also the mixed-bag, alternative-style gangsta of Outkast, the annoying speed-rap gangsta of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the tired West Coast rehash of Do or Die -- and that's only in the Top 30. At the heart of hip-hop, the hardcore attitude still dominates and will continue to do so no matter how many times the Fugees multiply their platinum sales or a superstar's "realness" ends up costing him his life. Like Tupac said, for the foreseeable future, this is it.