Night Beat (62 page)

The inside of the hall was no less colorful or joyful. Several thousand young people lined the various foyers and corridors of the Garden, pirouetting to the band’s genial rhythms, swirling their long hair and flowing dresses, twisting their hands and arms in elaborate gestures. One young woman—about fifteen, I’d say, dressed in a sweeping, black gossamer gown, her face adorned with multihued sparkles and tiny iridescent mirror discs—stopped me as I walked past one group of dancers. “Hey, mister,” she said. “Did anybody ever tell you you have beautiful eyes? I mean, you know, for an old guy?”

In every Dead show I saw, there was always a moment when it became plain that the audience’s participation in these gatherings—and its sanction of the band—was as much the purpose of the shows as was the musical performances. As often as not, I found that moment in the band’s reading of the Buddy Holly hit, “Not Fade Away.” There came a point toward the song’s end when the guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards would drop out of the sound, and there was only the band and the audience shouting those old and timeless lyrics: “Love is love and not fade away/Love is love and not fade away.”

“Not fade away,
the crowd would shout to the band.

“Not fade away,” the band shouted back.

“NOT FADE AWAY!” the crowd yowled, leaning forward as one.

It would go on like that, the two bodies of this misfit community singing hard to one another, bound up in the promise that as long as one was there, the other would always hold a hope.

Now that promise is gone, and along with it perhaps one of the last meaningful dreams of rock & roll community as well. In the seasons since Jerry Garcia’s death, I have thought many times about that young woman in the flowing black gown who smiled, touched my face, and danced away into the darkness of the hallway, moving to the Dead’s rhythms. And I have wondered: For whom will she dance now? Who will stir her hopes? I don’t know, but I know this: We are poorer for having lost such dreamers.

tupac shakur: easy target

I
don’t know whether to mourn Tupac Shakur or to rail against all the terrible forces—including the artist’s own self-destructive temperament—that have resulted in such a wasteful, unjustifiable end. I do know this, though: Whatever its causes, the murder of Shakur, at age twenty-four, has robbed us of one of the most talented and compelling voices of recent years. He embodied just as much for his audience as Kurt Cobain did for his. That is, Tupac Shakur spoke to and for many who had grown up within (and maybe never quite left) hard realities—realities that mainstream culture and media are loath to understand or respect—and his death has left his fans feeling a doubly-sharp pain: the loss of a much-esteemed signifier, and the loss of a future volume of work that, no doubt, would have proved both brilliant and provocative.

Certainly, Shakur was among the most ingenious and lyrical of the present generation of rappers, often pitting his dark-toned staccato-yet-elastic cadences against lulling and clever musical backdrops, for an effect as memorable for its melodic contours as for its rhythmic verve. In addition, his four albums
—2Pacalypse Now, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. . . . , Me Against the World,
and
All Eyez on
Me (a fifth album,
Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory,
was released under the name Makaveli late in 1996)—ran the full range of rap’s thematic and emotional breadth. In the first two albums alone, you could find moments of uncommon tenderness and compassion (the feminine-sympathetic portrayals in “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and “Keep Ya Head Up”), astute political and social observation (“Trapped,” “Soulja’s Story,” and “I Don’t Give a Fuck”), and also declarations of fierce black-against-black anger and brutality (the thug-life anthems “Last Wordz” and “5 Deadly Venomz”). What made this disconcerting mix especially notable was how credible it all seemed. Shakur could sing in respectful praise and defense of women then turn around and deliver a harangue about “bitches” and “ho’s”—or could boast of his gangster prowess one moment, then condemn the same doomed mentality in another track—and you never doubted that he felt and meant every word he declaimed. Does that make him sound like a confused man? Yes—to say the least. But Shakur was also a man willing to own up to and examine his many contradictory inclinations, and I suspect that quality, more than any other, is what made him such a vital and empathetic voice for so many of his fans.

Shakur was also a clearly gifted actor (his first performance, as an adolescent, was in a stage production of
A Raisin in the Sun
)—though he wasn’t especially well served by such mediocre young-blacks-coming-of-age films as
Poetic Justice
and
Above the Rim.
The 1992
Juice
(his first film) wasn’t much better, though it contains Shakur’s best performance to date (two films,
Gridlock’d
and
Gang Related,
were released in 1997). In
Juice,
Shakur played Bishop—a young man anxious to break out of the dead-end confinements of his community, and who settles on an armed robbery as the means of proving his stature, his “juice.” Once Bishop has a gun in his hand, everything about his character, his life, his fate, changes. He shoots anything that obstructs him—including some lifelong friends. He kills simply to kill, as if by doing so he will eventually shoot through the one thing that hurts him the most: his own troubled heart. “I
am
crazy,” he tells a character at one point. “But you know what else? I don’t give a fuck.” Shakur speaks the line with such sure and frightening coldness, it is impossible to know whether he informed it with his own experience, or whether he was simply uncovering a disturbing but liberating personal ethos.

But it was with his two final recordings
—Me Against the World
and
All Eyez on Me—
that Shakur achieved what was probably his best realized and most enduring work. The two albums are like major statements about violence, social realism, self-willed fate, and unappeasable pain, made by two different, almost opposing sensibilities. Or they could be read as the combined, sequential statements of one man’s growth—except in Shakur’s case, it appears that the growth moved from hard-earned enlightenment to hard-bitten virulence.
Me Against the World
(recorded after he was shot in a 1994 robbery and during his imprisonment for sexually abusing a woman) was the eloquent moment when Shakur paused to examine all the trouble and violence in his life, and measured not only his own complicity in that trouble but how such actions spilled into, and poisoned, the world around him.

In
All Eyez on Me,
released a year later on Death Row Records, Shakur gave way to almost all the darkness he had ever known—and did so brilliantly. Indeed,
Eyez
is one of the most melodically and texturally inventive albums that rap has ever produced—and also one of the most furious. Tracks like “California Love” and “Can’t C Me” are rife with sheer beauty and exuberance, and even some of the more dangerous or brooding songs (“Heartz of Men,” “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,” “Life Goes On,” “Only God Can Judge Me,” “Got My Mind Made Up”) boast gorgeous surfaces over their pure hearts of stone. In both albums, in song after song, Shakur came up against the same terrible realization: He could see his death bearing down on top of him, but he didn’t know how to step out of its unrelenting way. So he stood there, waiting, and while he waited, he made one of rap’s few full-length masterpieces.

The hardest-hitting, most eventful song of the
Eyez
project—and possibly of Shakur’s career—appears as an extra cut on the “California Love” single: a track called “Hit ’Em Up.” According to many in the rap community, the song is an attack aimed (mainly) at Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Bad Boy label, (specifically) at recording artist Biggie Smalls (the Notorious B.I.G.). In the last couple of years, these figures had become arch rivals of Marion “Suge” Knight, owner and co-founder of Death Row Records, and Shakur indicated that he suspected they were involved in his 1994 shooting. As a result, “Hit ’Em Up” was much more than just a song—it was Shakur’s salvo of revenge and warning. “I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker,” he says, addressing Biggie Smalls as the track opens, referring to a rumor about B.I.G.’s wife and Shakur. But that boast is trite compared to what follows: “Who shot me?” he barks. “But you punks didn’t finish. Now you’re about to feel the wrath of the menace, nigga.” A minute later, Shakur steps up his rage: “You want to fuck with us, you little young ass motherfuckers . . . ?” he rails. “You better
back
the fuck up or you get
smacked
the fuckup. . . . We ain’t singin’, we bringin’ drama. . . . We gonna kill ALL you motherfuckers. . . . Fuck Biggie, fuck Bad Boy . . . and if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too. . . . Die
slow
motherfucker. . . . You think you mob, nigga?
We
the motherfucking mob. . . . You niggas mad because our staff got
guns
in their motherfuckingbelts. . . . We bad boy killers/We kill ’em.”

I have never heard anything remotely like Tupac Shakur’s breathless performance on this track in all my years of listening to pop music. It contains a remarkable amount of rage and aggression—enough to make anything in punk seem flaccid by comparison. Indeed, “Hit ’Em Up” truly crosses the line from art and metaphor to real-life jeopardy. On one level, you might think Shakur was telling his enemies: We will kill you competitively, commercially. But listen to the stunning last thirty seconds of the track. It’s as if Shakur were saying: Here I am—your enemy, and your target. Come and get me, or watch me get you first. (In a horrible echo of Shakur’s own end, the Notorious B.I.G. was also gunned down a few months later, on the streets of Los Angeles.)

SO: A MAN SINGS about death and killing, and then the man is killed. There is a great temptation for many to view one event as the result of the other. And in Tupac Shakur’s case, there’s some grounds for this assessment: He did more than sing about violence; he also participated in a fair amount of it. As Shakur himself once said, in words that
Time
magazine appropriated for their headline covering his murder: WHAT GOES ’ROUND COMES ’ROUND. Still, I think it would be a great disservice to dismiss Shakur’s work and life with any quick and glib headline summations. It’s like burying the man without hearing him.

I suspect also that Shakur’s death will be cited as justification for yet another campaign against hardcore rap and troublesome lyrics. By this point, it’s become one of the perennial causes of the last decade. In 1989, the FBI got into the act by contacting Priority Records to note the bureau’s official distaste for the groundbreaking group N.W.A.’s unyielding, in-your-face song, “Fuck tha Police.” In 1990,
Newsweek
ran a cover story titled “Rap Rage, Yo!,” calling rap a “streetwise music,” rife with “ugly macho boasting,” and three years later the magazine reiterated its disdain with a Snoop Doggy Dog cover posting the question: WHEN IS RAP 2 VIOLENT? In 1992, conservative interest groups and riled police associations pressured Warner Bros. Records to delete “Cop Killer” from Ice-T’s
Body Count
album (subsequently, Warner’s separated itself from Ice-T). And in 1995, moralist activists William Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker succeeded in pressuring Warner’s to break the label’s ties with Interscope Records, due to Interscope’s support of a handful of hardcore rap artists—including Tupac Shakur. You can almost hear Bennett and Tucker preparing their next line of argument: “Look what has come from the depraved world of rap: real-life murder on the streets! It’s time to stop the madness.” It isn’t altogether unlikely that such a campaign might have some effect—at least on wary major labels. Already, according to reports in various newspapers and trade magazines, some record executives are questioning whether any further associations with rap and its bad image will be worth the political heat that labels will have to face.

It is true, of course, that certain figures in the rap community have taken their inflammatory rhetoric and violent posturing to an insane, genuinely deadly level. It is also saddening and horrible to witness such lethal rivalry between so many young men with such innovative talents—especially when these artists and producers share the sort of common social perspective that should bring them together. Death Row and Bad Boy could have a true and positive impact on black America’s political abilities—but that can’t happen if the companies seek merely to increase their own standing by tearing away at perceived-enemy black opponents. From such actions, no meaningful or valuable victories are to be had.

At the same time, there’s nothing meaningful or valuable to be gained by censuring hardcore rap—or at least that course would offer no real solutions to the very real problems that much of the best (and worst) rap signifies. For that matter, it would only undermine much of rap’s considerable contribution to popular culture. Rap began as a means of black self-expression in the early 1980s, and as it matured into the wide-ranging art form of hip-hop, it also became a vital means of black achievement and invention. In the process, rap began to report on and reveal many social realities and attitudes that most other arts and media consistently ignored—that is, rap gave voice and presence to truths that almost no other form of art or reportage was willing to accommodate. Works like N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” and
Niggaz4Life
may have seemed shocking to some observers, but N.W.A. didn’t invent the resentment and abuse that they sang about. Nor did Ice-T, Ice Cube, or the Geto Boys invent the ghetto-rooted gang warfare and drive-by shootings that they sometimes rapped about. These conditions and dispositions existed long before rap won popular appeal (also long before the explosive L.A. riots of 1992), and if hardcore rap were to disappear tomorrow, that state of affairs would still exist.

What disturbed so many about rap—what it is actually deemed guilty for—is how vividly and believably it gave force to the circumstances that the music’s lyrics and voices illuminated. It wasn’t pleasant to hear about murderous rage and sexist debasement—to many, in fact, it came across as actual threat. As one journalist-author friend told me when I recommended that he hear Snoop Doggy Dog’s
Doggystyle:
“I don’t buy records from people who want to kill me.” Interestingly, such music fans didn’t seem to brandish the same scrupulous distaste when rock groups like the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and several others also sang about murder, violence, rage, and cultural havoc.

Tupac Shakur, like many other rappers, intoned about a world that he either lived in or witnessed—in Shakur’s case, in fact, there was a good deal less distance between lyrics and life than is the case with most pop music figures. Sometimes, Shakur saw clearly the causes for his pain and anger and aspired to rise above being doomed by that delimitation; sometimes, he succumbed to his worst predilections. And far too often he participated in actions that only spread the ruin: He was involved in at least two shootings, numerous vicious physical confrontations, several rancid verbal assaults, and was convicted and served time for sexual abuse. In the end, perhaps Shakur’s worst failing was to see too many black men and women with backgrounds similar to his as his real and mortal enemies.