Tupac Amaru Shakur knew so much trouble in this world, it was easy to forget that he was only 25 years old. He’d soaked his art and his life in a mystique of violence, selling 6 million albums in the process. Now the two had crashed fatally together. Critics of gangsta rap’s increasingly violent imagery, from William Bennett to Jesse Jackson, have long contended that the brutality of the lyrics spilled over into the real world. Shakur’s murder showed how close the two worlds sometimes run.
For young hip-hoppers, this was the death of a self-invented legend. The actress Jada Pinkett, a childhood friend from the Baltimore School of Performing Arts, remembers a gentle kid who was ““always telling me to calm down and stay on the straight and narrow.’’ Lately, though, colleagues were afraid to travel with him, fearful of his brazen violence and the enmity he cultivated. In November 1994, he was shot five times in a robbery outside a New York recording studio. He thought he was set up by a rival rapper, and did all he could to stir the bad blood with East Coast rappers, even rapping on one record, ““You claim to be a player, but I f—ed your wife.’’ As he played the sociopath, his celebrity and his sales swelled. ““If Pac doesn’t have words with someone wherever we go out, we check to see if he’s sick,’’ said a friend. He took to wearing a bulletproof vest; he took to showing it off at photo shoots. ““I’ve spent the last nine months waiting for the phone call to tell me he was dead,’’ said one friend at the hospital, who–like most people interviewed for this article–spoke only on the condition of anonymity. ““I’ve just been waiting, almost hoping for it because I [knew it was] coming sooner or later.''
The details of the Sept. 7 shooting remain incomplete. Shakur and Marion (Suge) Knight, head of Shakur’s label, Death Row, were in Vegas for the heavyweight match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. Knight, who recently opened a nightclub in Vegas, has been linked with the Piru Bloods gang in his hometown of Compton, in Los Angeles. He has as many enemies as Tupac; sources close to him say there are three contracts on his life. At the arena, Shakur and Knight’s entourage got into a vicious fight with a member of the audience. Afterward they left for Knight’s Las Vegas mansion and then, in a 10-car caravan, for Knight’s club, 662 (that’s MOB on the telephone pad). Shakur rode in Knight’s new 750 BMW. At about 11:15 p.m., a white Cadillac rolled along the passenger side. ““Two men got out of the [Cadillac] because the traffic was stalled,’’ a member of the entourage told NEWSWEEK. ““Then they just started spraying bullets. I could see Tupac trying to jump into the back seat. That’s how his chest got exposed so much.’’ The witness also told NEWSWEEK that the group returned fire (Knight did not answer requests for comment). Four bullets hit Shakur. One fragment grazed Knight’s head. Police say they have no suspect, because members of the entourage have not cooperated. ““You know more than we know about that night,’’ said Sgt. Kevin Manning, lead investigator.
People in the music industry speculate that for all Tupac’s volatility, the target of the hit was really Knight. ““This is the beginning of some s–t that’s been waiting to happen a long time,’’ said a source close to Death Row. ““The best way to get Suge is to mess with his money. Tupac is his money.’’ According to Las Vegas police, there are 5,000 gang members in town, many of them originally from L.A. Some suggest the shooting was a hit by the Crips, either from Vegas or L.A. ““Whoever did it,’’ says a friend of Knight’s, ““is seriously in some s–t because this isn’t something Suge is going to just drop. You will start seeing Negroes drop real soon.’’ Three Crips were shot in Compton last week. Police sources in L.A.–even they insisted on anonymity–consider these shootings direct retaliation for the hit against Shakur. ““This is only the beginning, and we are braced to see the backlash of the shooting for a while.''
The music business has long flirted with tough guys. In 1957, Don Rickles was working the Slate Brothers nightclub in Los Angeles when Frank Sinatra walked in. ““Make yourself at home, Frank,’’ Rickles heckled–““hit somebody.’’ In 1973, the elite of the business gathered in New York for the United Jewish Appeal’s tribute to its man of the year, Morris Levy. Levy was, by various descriptions, a ““character’’ (his choice), the founder of Roulette Records and, later, a convicted associate of the Genovese crime family. At the UJA tribute, Joe Smith, then head of Elektra Records, lauded Levy, then noted, ““and I just got word from two of his friends on the West Coast that my wife and children have been released!’’ In September 1996, at the MTV Awards in New York, comedian Chris Rock acknowledged the movers and shakers in attendance. ““Hey, Suge Knight, how ya doin?’’ he nodded. ““Don’t kill me.''
Knight, who built a $100 million rap empire in just four years, earned his reputation early. A 1991 suit alleged that he had settled a contract negotiation with baseball bats and pipes. The suit was dismissed. Like Shakur, Knight is in touch with his own myth. A big man, well over 300 pounds, he rarely appears without some touch of red, the Bloods’ color. ““The rumors about me are helpful but not true,’’ he told NEWSWEEK last year. ““They prevent people from f—ing with me. I do what I have to do to get what I want. So does everybody else.’’ Death Row’s music, notoriously violent rap by Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre and others, has only fed his reputation.
““Everybody is afraid of Suge Knight–been that way for a while,’’ says one top black record executive. ““I’ve never had problems with him, but I was told at one point to hire security because of he and his crew. He is singlehandedly holding black music hostage.’’ Earlier this year Dr. Dre, a founding partner of Death Row and producer behind most of the label’s hits, left the company. ““The negative element there was just too strong,’’ he told NEWSWEEK. One top music executive believes the fallout from last week’s shooting will be felt throughout the industry. Tupac’s murder, he said, ““only makes it harder to get deals done. Who wants this kind of mess going on with their artists?''
The menace was part of Death Row’s allure; Shakur fit in perfectly. The son of a Black Panther, the child of an arts education, he was in the end largely self-invented. He once said that as a kid he thought his mother’s name was ““black bitch,’’ because that’s what he heard the police calling her–which only shows how adept he was at turning life into stagy autobiography, finding the spots where truth and bull ran together. In interviews, which played like performances, he likened himself to ““a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play,’’ to John Wayne, Marvin Gaye, Vincent van Gogh–““because nobody appreciated his work until he was dead.’’ In his recordings, he was obsessed with death, with the legend he would leave behind. ““Bury Me Like a G [gangsta]’’ and ““How Long Will They Mourn Me’’ were two song titles. He was his own most attentive audience.
Friends said Shakur was greatly changed after being shot in 1994 and going to prison the following year for sexual abuse. ““It really shook him up,’’ said one. ““He seemed to understand how sacred life was.’’ Legal fees from the trial and several civil suits, though, bankrupted him. While he was in prison, Knight offered to pay his debts and more than $1 million in bail, and Shakur signed with Death Row. With the money, he bought a house for his mother. But in the Death Row camp, he embraced his old image, more volatile than before. He inflamed his running feuds. He got into a confrontation at the MTV Awards on Sept. 4. ““He said he wanted to get away from the violence and live a calmer life,’’ said the friend. ““But those were only words.''
In recent interviews, he talked about two identities fighting inside him. ““One wants to live in peace, and the other won’t die unless he’s free.’’ The split could be maddening. He rhymed moving tributes to black women, and to his mother; he rhymed about bitches and hos. He spun tales of gratuitous carnage; he talked about the need for education and black self-sufficiency. He was indestructible; he was uncommonly vulnerable. He was the most articulate voice of intelligent black male anger. The split was not Tupac’s alone, and it was part of the blood that bound him to the community. ““Tupac said the things I thought and felt a lot of times,’’ said Malcolm Hill, 16, at the hospital for the vigil. ““It’s like sometimes I feel I am really bad and can’t nobody do nothing to me. And then sometimes I think I am f—ed.’’ This schism is life for millions of young black males: rappers, gang-bangers or college students. And its vivid, contradictory depiction is the poetic legacy of Tupac Shakur.
