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2 pac
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| Natalie User Info... | Bozo in the 'hood -- by Mark Steyn from The American Spectator, November 1996 So where were you when you heard the news that Tupac had been shot? Statistically, there's a pretty good chance you were with him: there were 49 assorted boyz 'n' hoods and hoes 'n' bitches in his entourage, dozens more milling in the street. "But nobody saw anything," said Sergeant Kevin Manning of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. "Strange, huh?" Statistically, there's an even greater chance that you're one of the thousands who emerged to eulogize him in the press as "the James Dean of hip- hop" - both were talented young men, both died in automobiles (though Tupac was in the passenger seat). The media divided into those who were hip and those caught on the hop: The Village Voice was ready with rap insiders, men with one name ("Tour "), men with lower case names ("dream hampton," which is not apparently a New York realtor's designation but a hiphopper who knew Tupac well enough to call him Pac); the squaresville publications were forced to go for the broader brush stroke, getting their middle-class boyz from the 'burbs to argue, as The Washington Post tried gamely to do, that he was yet another victim of the Gingrich Terror. Bob Dole, who'd been handed speeches in which he attacked 2Pac, was puzzled by the news, having assumed 2Pac was like Gopac, only liberal and Democratic. (2Pac, incidentally, was Tupac's preferred appellation: like many gangsta rappers, he opted to spell his name like a vanity license plate; in 2Pac's case, his name was converted into a number, and ultimately into a statistic.) As for the rest of us, thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans, we gathered in vigils with friends and family to sing our favorite Tupac songs. And then we realized we didn't know any. When Bing died, most Americans knew he was the guy who sang "White Christmas." Elvis? "Heartbreak Hotel." Lennon? Sgt. Pepper. But 2Pac is a model of contemporary shortcut celebrity: he became a household name without ever having had a household song. First, he was famous for sexual assault; next, he was famous for being shot; now, he's famous for being dead. His latest album, the prophetically titled All Eyez On Me shot (as we say) from 69 on the Billboard album chart to 18. Twenty years ago in Britain, a guy called Pete Wingfield had a hit single called "Eighteen With a Bullet", a reference to Billboard's practice of highlighting fast-selling records with a bullet motif. Poor old Tupac's album was literally 18 with a bullet. Le mort du 2Pac was full of distracting details like that. This guy, Suge Knight, for example, the 300-lb. gangsta impresario of Death Row Records who seems to be taking a surprisingly relaxed view of the murder, in the adjoining seat, of his biggest-selling artiste. I was vaguely aware that in 1994 Suge had paid $1.4 million to spring Pac from jail, and that Suge was a member of the Bloods, or maybe it was the Crips - anyway, not the Elks; I dimly recalled that during contractual negotiations he'd threatened Eazy-E, since dead of AIDS, with a baseball bat. But, until the aftermath of Tupac's death, I never knew that Suge's house in Vegas was next door to Wayne Newton's. Wayne Newton! What did Wayne ever do to deserve that? It's like discovering Saddam Hussein lives next door to Angela Lansbury. What do they talk about over the fence? We can only imagine how poor old Wayne feels. Friends of mine nominated for the wussier categories at the Grammies (classical, show album, best liner notes for a telephone-sales wartime nostalgia compilation) told me that, where pop had once been merely metaphorically "dangerous," this year it was literally so, with warring rappers and their bodyguards, all armed to the hilt, taunting each other backstage. Wayne doesn't need that in his backyard. I hadn't thought of Wayne Newton in years, but, ever since he came up in connection with 2Pac's death, I can't get his maddeningly catchy "Danke Schoen" out of my head: Danke Schoen Darling, danke schoen Thank you for all the joy and pain... I recall Central Park in fall Where you tore your dress What a mess I confess That's not all... I never have figured out what Wayne's going on about there: some sort of easy- listening wilding? With 2Pac, on the other hand, you always knew where you stood - ideally, on the other side of the street. In 1994, he was convicted for holding down a ho (or, as we used to say, young lady - indeed, a teenage girl) while his pals forcibly sodomized her. Thank you for all the joy and pain. That was more or less the line of his eulogists: there are 2 sides to every Pac, and we must understand both of them. His, we're told, was a tragedy moving remorselessly towards its final act. Like Hamlet, any internal agonizing wasn't going to make any difference: "To pack or not to pack? That is the question," he may have mused as he was picking out firearms for the MTV Awards, but, ultimately, he had no choice but to embrace his fate. Moved by these elegies, I went out and bought the album. It doesn't alas, print the words, but, after several listens to, say, "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" (a duet with Snoop Doggy Dogg), you get the gist of the lyric, which boils down to: "Don't motherf--- with me, you motherf----- , or you'll wind up like all them other motherf------ motherf-----s (Repeat until fade)..." I'm sorry, I've made a frightful faux pas: "motherf-----s" should, of course, be "muthaf-----z." As the CD plays, you see what his obituarists are getting at: more than the James Dean of hip-hop, the Kurt Cobain of hardcore, or even the Hamlet of the 'hood, his was an inexorable tragedy of Sophoclean proportions, coursing relentlessly to its final scene with ululating Greek choruses of raptivists and industry insiders explaining what's really going down. Like Oedipus, he was a real bad muthaf----. Obviously, there are variations on the theme: I won't deny it I'm a street fighter You don't wanna f--- with me... And occasionally the young man's fancy turned to traditional Tin Pan Alley fare. You remember Ray Noble's lyric to "The Very Thought of You"? I see your face in every flower Your eyes in stars above... Tupac has much the same problem: No matter where I go I see the same ho... The lady in question turns up everywhere. As he observes later in the song: I'm watchin' the Million Man March and I see the same bitch on the Million Man March! Possibly this is what The New Republic's Michael Lewis had in mind when he hailed rap as "the nearest thing to a political voice of the poor. Tupac says he discovered his music and its themes 'when I was out there with nowhere to stay, no money,' and that theme runs right through his lyrics, along with an impressive indifference to mainstream politics." In fact, Tupac has an impressive indifference, running right through his lyrics, to almost anything except the ho or bitch he happens to be having sex with at the time. Even his contribution to the supposed East Coast/West Coast rap wars was admirably single-minded. Tupac, convinced that the New York rapper The Notorious B.I.G. had played a part in his 1994 shooting, boasted on "Hit 'Em Up" that he'd "slept with," as Entertainment Weekly coyly phrased it, Mrs. B.I.G. - or, as 2Pac put it: "I f---ed your bitch, you fat muthaf---er." As for more conventional politics, he calls, in his liner notes, for the freeing of "all Politikal Prisonerz," including his stepfather Mutula Shakur. Presumably, Mutula counts as a political prisoner because, when any black man is jailed by the racist white state, that act by definition is political. It would be interesting to know if, up in heaven, 2Pac now takes the same line on his own black murderer. Still, as surgeons cut open his "Thug Life" tattoo to get at the three bullets inside him, Jesse Jackson and the Nation of Islam were both in attendance at the hospital, laying claim to his legacy: Tupac, it seems, is not just the James Dean of hip-hop, the Hamlet of the 'hood, but also the Gandhi of gangsta rap. As his life ebbed away, many commentators, evoking timeless songs like "Thug Passion" and "Run Tha Streetz" with their deathless deathful prose, rushed to discuss Tupac not as a gangsta rapper (which, sadly, has pejorative connotations) but as a poet. Lyrical forebears such as Oscar Hammerstein and Ira Gershwin disdained the term, but Tupac, it seems, was not just the James Dean of hiphop and the Gandhi of gangsta rap but also the Shelley of the shoot-outs. Traditionally, admired pop stars are hailed for being "on the edge," for "pushing the boundaries," for their "sense of danger." Aware perhaps that, for most tastes, 2Pac had gone over the edge, obliging obituarists tried to pull him back, to make him less dangerous. They pointed out that he was a graduate of "Baltimore's prestigious High School of the Performing Arts" - in other words, not a real revolutionary, just another in the long line of art-school poseurs inaugurated by Mick Jagger. In The New York Times, Jon Pareles's line seemed to be that, left to himself, 2Pac would have been a benign figure, the Andy Williams of gangsta rap. Instead, he'd been lured down the hardcore end and been consumed by stardom: the James Dean of hip hop, the Shelley of the shoot-outs, was also, tragically, the Karen Carpenter of Compton. The day after Tupac expired, Juliet Prowse died. Years ago, when she and Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine were filming Can-Can, they were visited on the set by Khrushchev. He looked at the highkicking dancers and denounced the whole thing as "decadent." Tupac had to make do with being denounced by Bob Dole and William Bennett, and they've proved ineffectual. Bennett supposedly shamed Time-Warner into selling their stake in Interscope, who control Death Row. But, if you scan the fine print on the album, you'll see that 2Pac's songs were co-published by Warner-Tamerlane, Chappell, Polygram, EMI-Virgin, MCA, ASCAP, BMI... The biggest, most respected names in the music business are all on there, profiting in some small way from 2Pac's brief thug life. It is, in the end, minstrelsy; black pain, even unto death, served up for the amusement of white audiences. He wasn't an "authentic voice of the black urban poor": 75 percent of rap's sales are to white suburban youth; they're the ones sending off for the hooded sweatshirts you can order from the merchandising pullouts in Pac's album. I have no particular quarrel with the man himself: he was a jerk who got rich peddling attitude to impressionable teenagers, and there's nothing un-American about that. Black writers like Nelson George have described him as "self-aware" about the "ironies" of the gangsta life, but whatever self-awareness the dumb schmuck had, it wasn't enough. With perfect timing, Death Row Records, a few days after their star's murder, couriered 2Pac's last video over to MTV, with the disingenuous suggestion that they might like to rush it into high rotation. Filmed a couple of months ago, it shows, by a remarkable coincidence, the vocal artiste dying in a drive-by shooting in a car not dissimilar from Suge's. All it lacks is a bullet-ridden 2Pac turning to Suge and gasping with his dying breath, "Et 2, Brute?" Thus life imitates art, or at least the video. But Death Row has a product to push. I marvel at the attempts of the respectable media to mythologize the bozo in the 'hood, to find in his half-baked hoodlum exhibitionism some bogus heroism that will endure through the ages. - Sat, 15 Jan 2005 9:52pm | ||
| Nik Olaz User Info... | Racism. I'm so sick of hearing "rap sucks" bullshit from people. It's a form of music along with everything else out there. I think most people just can't handle a black person making a name for themselves without the help of some white guy. Whoever wrote this can fuck off and die in whatever trailer he was born in. - Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:52pm | ||
| The One After Two User Info... | there is no racism here... 2Pac was not a great man and companies did and do profit off him Mark Steyn is a shitty writer, a traitor to his country and a right wing lunatic that we could agree on... but I digress :-) http://www.marksteyn.com/ - Sat, 15 Jan 2005 11:06pm | ||
| _Griphin_ User Info... | The press killed 2-Pac, nuff said... - Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:14pm | ||
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