ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 20, 1996 TAG: 9609200006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FERNANDO GONZALEZ KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
Tupac Shakur's violent end was a case of death foretold.
Shakur, 25, died a week ago in a Las Vegas hospital from wounds suffered Sept. 7 after being shot in a car driven by Marion ``Suge'' Knight, chairman of Los Angeles-based Death Row Records. According to reports, a white Cadillac with four men inside pulled up, and someone opened fire. Shakur was hit four times, at least twice in the chest. Knight was treated and released.
The rapper's recent history was dotted with incidents of violence and difficulties with the police. He was one of the figureheads of gangsta rap, a genre characterized by brutal imagery depicting often violent situations in crude language.
Shakur sold millions of records and topped the charts with albums such as ``Me Against The World'' (1995) and ``All Eyez On Me'' (1996) but was at times ambivalent with gangsta rap. In ``Me Against the World,'' he typically went from glorified shoot-'em-ups (``Outlaw'') to pleas to young blacks to move beyond gang life (``Young Niggaz'').
At times, he framed his songs in political terms, as an expression of a discarded underclass. Then again, he also often blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, where the character who sang the lines ended and the real Tupac Shakur began. It might have became his undoing.
His ``Thug Life,'' tattooed on his chest, was street bravado elevated to philosophy of life, equal parts rap act, support group and ideology.
``I'm making a movement for those who are already there,'' he told Newsday in 1993. ``The have-nots, all the underdogs, all the niggas with no daddies, all the niggas that nobody wants, all the niggas in juvenile hall, in jail and everything. We have our own world, since nobody wants us in theirs. I'm going to remind people how cursed it is out here by being just how I am. So basically I don't give a This is my job.'' At one point, he spoke of opening a community center and turning Thug Life into a political force.
But such a high-minded approach proved beyond his reach.
``I'm not as deep as Martin Luther King or Gandhi,'' he once said to USA Today. ``I only know how to strike back. That's the only thing I've seen that works.''
In fact, Shakur gained notoriety as quickly for his legal troubles as for his recording and film career.
In 1991, the year his debut album ``2Pacalypse Now'' was released, he was arrested in Oakland, Calif. for jaywalking and resisting arrest. In 1992, he starred as the psychopathic character Bishop in Ernest R. Dickerson's ``Juice.'' That year, a 6-year-old died of a gunshot wound after a confrontation between Shakur and members of a local rap group at an outdoor concert in Marin City, Calif. The civil suit concluded in 1995 with a settlement estimated between $300,000 and $500,000.
In 1993, his million-plus seller ``Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.'' was released. One of the singles reached the top 15 in the Billboard charts.
But paradoxically his success seemed to deepen, not alleviate, his rage.
That same year, he was arrested for carrying a loaded concealed weapon. Later he and a friend were arrested for beating a limousine driver who was taking them to a taping of the comedy TV show ``In Living Color.'' Charges were dropped. But a civil suit was filed against Shakur after a brawl with film director Allen Hughes, after Hughes fired him from ``Menace II Society.''
And he was also arrested in Atlanta for shooting two police officers - and weeks later, in New York, sexual assault charges were filed by a 20-year-old woman. While on trial, he was shot five times in the lobby of a New York City recording studio. At the time, he implied that some New York rappers had been involved in the attack. Meanwhile his ``Me Against The World'' debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart.
Shakur was eventually convicted and spent 11 months in prison. He was released on a $1.4 million bond posted by Knight. A double CD, ``All Eyez On Me,'' was later released on Knight's Death Row label. It also debuted at No. 1 and has since sold at least 5 million copies.
In it, Shakur uses some of the tracks to dare his East Coast rivals to come to California to settle matters. Millions of records later, the rage, if anything, had grown deeper.
His personal story offers few insights.
He is the son of Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams), a former Black Panther. In fact, she was one of the notorious Panther 21, a New York-based branch who in 1969 were arrested and charged with a number of felonies, including conspiracy to bomb several public city places. Afeni was one of 14 acquitted in May 1971. A month later, Tupac Amaru Shakur was born. His father is unknown. This, Shakur said years later, made him feel ``unmanly.''
The man whom the rapper considered his father, a gangster called Legs who might have been his biological father, did time in jail and died from a crack-induced heart attack at the age of 41.
After her acquittal, Afeni Shakur and her two children reportedly moved around a lot, even having to repair to homeless shelters.
``I remember crying all the time,'' Tupac Shakur recalled in an interview with Vibe, a national hip-hop monthly, in 1994. ``My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with.''
``Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto, you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life, and you don't fit in no matter what,'' he said. ``Looking back, I see that as the actor in me. The reason why I could get into acting was because it takes nothin' to get out of who I am to get into somebody else.''
When he was 12, his mother actually enrolled him in the 127th Street Ensemble, a Harlem theater group. His first performance - he was 13 at the time - was in ``A Raisin in the Sun'' at the Apollo Theater. The family moved to Baltimore, and he auditioned and was accepted to the Baltimore School of the Performing Arts. He spent two years studying theater and voice.
In those days, Shakur, already highly politicized, would chide friends for using the word ``nigger'' or call women ``bitches.'' He wrote rap and poetry.
``I loved going to school. It taught me a lot. I was starting to feel I really wanted to be an artist,'' he recalled. But at 17, after his junior year, the family moved to California. ``Leaving that school affected me so much. Even now, I see that as the point where I got off track.'' Perhaps, but others see another turning point.
In Marin City, across the bay from Oakland, Shakur witnessed a brutal, daily reality of murder and drug dealing. ``It just made me hopeless,'' he once said. He found a voice in rap, joining the group Digital Underground.
He also later found a career in film, not only playing a part in Dickerson's ``Juice,'' but also the troubled Lucky in John Singleton's ``Poetic Justice'' (1993) opposite Janet Jackson and the drug-dealing Birdie in Jeffrey Pollack's ``Above the Rim'' (1994).
His troubles with the law caught up with him. Columbia Pictures reportedly forced Singleton to drop Shakur from ``Higher Learning'' (1995). At the time of his death, he had been working on ``Gridlock.''
LENGTH: Long : 124 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: KRT. Rap artist Tupac Shakur: ``I'm not as deep asby CNBMartin Luther King or Gandhi. I only know how to strike back. That's
the only thing I've seen that works.''