Tupac: Living the Life He Rapped About in Song

Near the beginning of Spike Lee’s film of Richard Price’s novel “Clockers,” a group of young black street-corner coke dealers--the “clockers” of the film’s title--heatedly debate hip-hop culture. At stake: Who is the “hardest” rapper in the game? Public Enemy rapper Chuck D’s name crops up, but he and other “positive” rappers are quickly moved down the list because they “never shot nobody,” they aren’t “slappin bitches up” and they haven’t “been to jail for murder.” One of the drug dealers insists that the “only niggas I hear representin’ (hard-core rap) is Tupac, G-Rap and Wu-Tang.”

The scene captures the bitter ironies and destructive contradictions that dogged the short, tragic life of Tupac Shakur, the rap star and film actor who died from gunshot wounds earlier this month. Tupac’s hard-core image was sufficiently established to bleed through the frames of Lee’s film--and through the high threshold for violence that gives too many young black males bottomless appetites for more thrilling, even erotic, displays of rhetorical and, yes, literal brutality. But the same scene, like Tupac’s conflicted career, also obscures truths that young black men must uncover in order to stem the tide of urban mayhem that they, to be sure, didn’t create but that they certainly extend.

After all, unlike the drug dealers in “Clockers,” who sit around arguing the merits of hard-core hip-hop, real black gangsters don’t always scoop up a gaggle of gangsta-rap tapes to ease them into the right frame of mind for mugging, mutilation or murder. Since they’re already living the life, they often seek escape through music with decidedly uplifting themes. Notorious real-life gangbanger “Monster” Sanyika Shakur, for instance, writes that he favored Al Green. And just think, all those wiseguys of yesteryear just loved Frank Sinatra flying them to the moon and dropping them off in New York, New York, always doing it his way--a useful rejoinder to those who argue a strict one-to-one correlation between art and social anarchy.

But it’s also a useful lesson to black kids about the limits of The Real and its relation to The Represented. Like the drug dealer in “Clockers” who lauds Tupac for representing the real hard core in his raps, black kids--indeed, so much of black culture--are obsessed with racial and cultural authenticity. The obsession for authentic blackness, for The Real, is driven, in large part, by the need to respond to stereotypical, racist portrayals of black life. The gestures, nuances, contradictions, complexities and idiosyncracies that define black life crowd the artistic visions of black writers, performers and intellectuals. Then, too, such a quest often restricts the range of what is considered acceptable within black life--”always put your best foot forward” is the unwritten rule governing many representations of black life.

Ironically, the complexity of black culture is stifled under such a belief: The Real gets equated with the Positive. What’s considered negative in black life is determined by its unfavorable relation to an increasingly limited view of the authentically black. The negative in black life is viewed as the inevitable pathology that results from misdirection, confusion or concession to white stereotypes of black life. Such a view of blackness is disabling. It alienates those whose lives coalesce at the outer perimeters of black respectability. Those who depart from the positive ideal are stigmatized within black life. Such stigmatization evokes representations of black life that challenge the rigid orthodoxy of blackness, especially those visions of black culture that are viewed as bourgeois, high falutin’--hence, fake. The ironic quest for authentic blackness now comes full circle: It is wrested from the puritanical souls of the black bourgeois, only to rest in the hands--and in the case of gangsta rappers, the throats--of ghetto dwellers, redefined in the canon of new black authenticity as Real Niggas.

By now, though, the Real Niggas are trapped by their own contradictory couplings of authenticity and violence. Tupac’s death is the most recent, and perhaps most painful, evidence of that truth. For Tupac and a host of black youth, thuggery and thanatopsis have come almost exclusively to define the black ghetto. That’s a sad retreat from a much more complex, compelling vision of black life that gangsta rap and hard-core hip-hop, at its best, helped outline.

At its outset, gangsta rap rudely--and refreshingly--resisted the artificial absorption of all black life into a narrative funnel of redemptive optimism or, at the very least, of reconstructive positivity. By thrusting the sharp edges of their lyrics into the inflated rhetoric of rigid black authenticity, they burst the psychic bubbles of blacks floating in comfortable, settled identities. Gangsta rap and hard-core hip-hop announced a ghetto renaissance: a flowering of vulgar self-expression rooted beneath the concrete predicates of polite discourse.

But by joining verbal vigor to rage--about material misery and racial hostility, about the avalanche of unheard suffering that suffocates black lives before they wake, walk or will their own survival--hard-core rappers proved that theirs was a redemptive vulgarity. At their best, they showed that the real vulgarity was the absurd way too many black folk perish on the vine of fruitless promises of neighborhood restoration, of racial rehabilitation. The hard-core hip-hopper proved that the real vulgarity was the vicious anonymity and punishing silence of poor black life, with which they broke faith every time they seized a mike to bring poetry to pain. Tupac knew this side of hard core, explored it with a balance that can only be called “celeterrogation”: the deft combination of celebration and interrogation. He rapped, in his beautiful baritone, about the plight of black welfare mothers. He skillfully narrated the thug’s life as a cautionary tale of self-destruction.

But, in the end, despite all his considerable gifts, Tupac helped pioneer a more dangerous, even destructive, trend in hard-core hip-hop that, ironically, draws from the oral energy of the orthodox black culture from which he sought thuggish refuge: Tupac yearned to live the life he rapped about in his songs. That golden ideal was the motive behind gospel passions in black culture to close the gap between preaching and practice, between what one said and what one did.

In the arc of Tupac’s secular, gangsta ambitions, such an inversion of the gospel’s guide to black behavior proved fatal. In 1993, Tupac was charged in the shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers. He had various convictions in Michigan and New York on assault and battery charges. Tupac served 11 months in jail after being convicted in a 1994 sexual assault of a woman in a New York hotel room. During his trial, he was shot five times in what appeared to be an armed-robbery attempt in New York’s Quad Recording Studios. Last April, he got into trouble for violating his probation. In May, he pleaded guilty to a felony weapons charge in Los Angeles. And in June, Tupac settled a lawsuit with a limousine driver who alleged that Tupac and other members of his entourage beat him severely in the parking lot of Fox TV after Tupac taped a segment of “In Living Color.” And on and on.

It would be simplistic to suggest that Tupac’s death came solely from his own destructive desire to forsake The Represented for The Real. After all, he was, in part, playing the cards dealt to him, extending and experimenting with the script he was handed at birth. Some of his most brilliant raps are about those cards and that script--poverty, ghetto life, the narrow choices of black men, the criminality into which too many flee as a refuge from the malevolent neglect of a racist society. But in falling prey to the temptation to be a gangster, Tupac lost his hold on the frustrating but powerful moral ambiguity that defines the rhetorical strategies and representational effectiveness of the gangsta rapper. In fleeing from art to the actual, from appearance to reality, from the studio to the streets, Tupac lost his life, and the most devastating weapon he possessed to fight the problems he saw: his brilliant representations of the reality he confronted, and the powerful reality that his representations, like those of all great artists, helped to bring about. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of a life cut short in troubled youth that Tupac didn’t live long enough to trust his genius.