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| | | ner cities. And the real Tupac was trying to leave Death Row when he was killed. NFAIRLY or not, Tupac Shakur's name has become synonymous with violent rap lyrics and “thug life” (a phrase Tupac had tattooed across his midriff). While he was alive, he was censured by politicians and, like other rappers, was kept from performing in some concert arenas because promoters could not insure the events against the threat of mayhem from fans. At the same time, however, he was suspected by many in his core ghetto audience of not being cold- blooded enough to measure up to his sta- tus as the archetypal gangsta rapper. These conflicting views of Tupac re- flect, to a degree, racial and social chasms. Rap fans insist that performers be authen- tic representatives of ghetto life: that they live the life they rap about, that life con- form ro art, so to speak. Rap’s critics, on the other hand, are terrified that life wei! conform to art, that the behavior—the drug dealing and the viclence—described by rappers will seep into the mainstream culture. The majority of ardent fans and consumers of rap are, in fact, middle-class white youths. (Seventy per cent of those who buy rap records are white.) It is the fear of a violent, marginalized culture’s influence on susceptible young people that fuels much of the political debate, and this fear is exacerbated by the wide- spread adoption of hip-hop style. Controversy, of course, has never hurt sales. To the contrary. Tupac understood this very well, as did the record-company execu- tives who stood to profit from his talents, and his notoriety. The more trouble Tupac got into with the law, the more credibility he gained on the street—and the more viable a rap star he became. The huge commercial success of gangsta rap created a peculiarly volatile nexus between the worlds of inner-city gangs and the multibillion-dollar record industry. Tupac sometimes said that he thought of his songs as parables, and now it is his own life—his journey into those two worlds, and his immolation at the point at which they converged—that seems almost allegorical. HE world of Suge Knight and South Central Los Angeles is at a far re- move from the one in which Tupac Shakur grew up, though each, in its own way, romanticized violence. Afeni Sha- | kur, Tupac’s mother, was a member of the Black Panther Party. Early in 1974, while she was pregnant with Tupac, she was on trial for conspiring to blow up several New York department stores. She and her codefendants—the Panther 21— were acquitted just a month before Tu- pac was born. He was named for “the last Inca chief to be tortured, brutalized, and murdered by Spanish conquistadores . . . a warrior,” Afeni says. His surname, Shakur, is 2 kind of clan name taken by a loose group of black nationalists in New York. The phrase “Black Power” had been “like a lullaby when I was a kid,” Tupac recalled in a deposition he gave in 1995 (in a civil suit in which it was charged that some of Tupac’s lyrics had influ- enced a young man who murdered a Texas state trooper). He remembered that when he was a teen-ager, living in Baltimore, “we didn't have any lights. I used to sit outside by the street lights and read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And it made it so real to me, that I didn’t have any lights at home and I was sitting outside on the benches reading this book. And it changed me, it moved me. And then of course my mother had books by people like... Patrice Lu- mumba and Stokely Carmichael, ‘Seize the Time’ by Bobby Seale and ‘Soledad Brother’ by George Jackson. And she would tell these stories of things that she did or she saw or she was involved with and it made me feel a part of something. She always raised me to think that I was the Black Prince of the revolution.” Tupac had indeed become a Black Prince by the time he was killed, but not along the fines laid out by the political activists of the sixties. Afeni and her friends were involved in what they perceived as revolutionary activity for the good of their community. Tupac and his fel- “=, low gangsta rappers sported diamond-encrusted gold jewelry, drove Rolls-Royce Comiches, and vied with one another in displays of gargantuan excess. Nevertheless, Tupac did not for- get who his forebears were. “In my fam- ily every black male with the last name of Shakur that ever passed the age of fif- teen has either been killed or put in jail,” ‘Fupac said in his deposition. “There are no Shakurs, black male Shakurs, out right now, free, breathing, without - THE NEW YORKER, JULY 7, 1997 bullet holes in them or cuffs on his hands. None.” The leaders of the black nationalist movement to which the other Shakurs belonged had been virtually eliminated, largely through the efforts of the F.B.I. In 1988, Tupac's stepfather, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, who had received a degree in acupuncture in Canada and used his skills to develop drug-abuse-treatment programs, was sentenced to sixty years in prison for conspiring to commit armed robbery and murder. The crimes he was accused of included the attempted rob- bery of a Bink’s armored car in 1981, in which two police officers and a guard were killed (and for which the Weather Underground leader Kathy Boudin was also convicted). Mutulu was also found guilty of conspiring to break Tupac’s “aunt,” Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesi- mard), out of prison. She had been con- victed in 1977 of murdering a New Jer- sey state trooper, but escaped two years later and fled to Cuba. Tupac's godfa- ther, Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, is a for- mer Black Panther Party leader who was convicted of killing a schoolteacher dur- ing a robbery in Santa Monica in 1968. He was imprisoned for twenty-seven years. His conviction was reversed a few weeks ago on the ground that the gov- ernment suppressed evidence favorable to him ar his trial (most significantly that the principal witness against him was a paid police informant). It was a haunting lineage, and Tupac would frequently invoke the names of Mutulu, Geronimo, and other “political prisoners” in his lyrics. “Ir was like their words with my voice,” he said. “I just continued where they left off. I tied to add spark to it, I tried to be the new breed, the new generation. I tried to make them proud of me.” But, at the same time, he did not want to de them. Their revolution, and in most cases their lives, too, were ashes. N the Panther 21 trial, Tupac’s mother defended herself with a withering cross-examination of a key prosecution witness, who turned out to be an under- cover government agent, after her acquit- tal, this unschooled but intellectually powerful woman was lionized in, liberal circles, invited to speak at Harvard. and Yale, and subsidized in an apartment on New York's Riverside Drive. Tupac and his sister Sekyiwa, who was born in