11/9/2022 0 Comments 2pac all eyez on me album interiorIn the wake of his killing, innuendo and superstition have rushed to fill the air. His life was bigger than his career, and everywhere he went his celebrity seemed like the last thing on his mind, as he hurled taunts and made promises which were easier for others to keep.Įspecially when he was standing up in Knight’s BMW, not wearing his bulletproof vest. His rapping technique was leaden, and hadn’t grown much over four records, but there was a plainspeak in his lyrics that could singe. An interior dialogue away from the kind of stardom few taste, he was a fine actor, razor eyes complicating a matinee-idol face. That softness was the secret of Shakur’s charisma. I’ll never know, but I thought I heard a person who wasn’t really bad, who was doing bad things to hang with the bad guys. “Other rappers have died or gone to prison and I didn’t feel anything. “I feel a hell of a loss, and I can’t understand why,” says Swamp Dogg. supermarket just days before he went to Vegas. Swamp Dogg, the 54-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer, ran into Shakur at an L.A. “You see all that cognitive dissonance in his life-a lot of black people know that from personal experience… Life, race relations, music, all of that stuff is very hypocritical all the time, and he was the embodiment of all that.” “He’s the kind of person a lot of us know talented, but in so much pain, and having problems dealing with it…” “He’s a person you recognize,” says 33-year-old poet and novelist Paul Beatty. But in the days after his death I heard more than one African-American with little use for Shakur as a rapper say they were surprised by their remorse. “You know what I think? Tupac is looking down on us, saying ‘Y’all don’t know what you’re missing up here.’ We the ones in hell.”įor many whites who listen to hip-hop, Shakur’s death is not so much an occasion for sorting out one’s feelings as finding them. You could be sitting there watching TV, and a stray bullet could go through your sheetrock wall and hit you in the head. He knew it, too, and he did not care.įor 28-year-old rapper E-40, a Bay Area native who has recorded with Shakur, Tupac’s death is an unreadable act of God. A man caught up “in the thing,” and unable to break free. Here was a man giving his life over to a power greater than himself. The biblical passage goes like this: “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods: for in the thing wherein they dealt proudly he was above them.” Somewhere in those words is a knowledge his black fans grasped better than anybody else. Less known was what it said on his back: EXODUS 18:11. Whites who knew little else about Shakur learned about that tattoo on his torso, the one that spelled THUG LIFE until the surgeons played their Scrabble. The more his fame grew, the more the split widened. That’s how it was for Tupac Shakur-there may never have been a pop star who signified so differently for so many different people. You could drive a flotilla of limousines through the gap separating the white lounge singer’s mockery from the grief of the black fans who gathered outside the University Medical Center. A white Cadillac pulled alongside him, about 13 rounds were fired, and Shakur went down. Shakur was standing in a black BMW driven by Knight, his head poking through the sunroof. Afterward, he and Death Row Records CEO Marion “Suge” Knight were driving to Knight’s Club 662 (named for the numbers you punch when spelling M-O-B on a Touch-Tone phone). He had come to Vegas for the September 7 Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon fight. Hours later, the 25-year-old Shakur was pronounced dead of respiratory failure and cardiopulmonary arrest. The crowd hoots, the kid obliges an obscure smile, and the show band glides into “California Love.” 2-3-4… “Ladies and gentlemen, a miracle has taken place. “Oh my God,” he says with a shocked voice. The singer points a rhinestone-festooned finger at a powerfully built young black man with a shaved head, standing before a row of video poker machines. Between Jimmy Buffett and Bell Biv DeVoe covers, he stares hard through the smoke to the back of the small room. It was early in the morning of Friday the 13th, and in a Las Vegas intensive care unit the world’s most famous rapper was drifting along in a “medicinally induced coma.” Across town, a lounge singer grabs the mike. This piece originally ran in the December 1996 issue of SPIN, and was published on the website in 2006, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Tupac Shakur’s death.
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