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vm <7 ROOMS RI A ae EU OR Oe 23 e f or 2 Con) vheabtoal Bas Black Panther Party.” Karen Lee, one of his publicists, told me, “and art times he wanted to be.” Lee said char he was furious that his mother’s former com- rades made no move to try co rescue her and her children when she became ad- dicted to drugs. Indeed. when he was liv- ing in Marin Citv—desrtinice, with no place to stay (his mother and he had fought bitterly, and he accused her of iv- ing to him abour her drug use}—it was mainly street people who tried to help him, Man Man (Charles Fuller), a friend who would later become his road man- ager. provided him with a bed. and kepr him trom becoming a fuil-Hedged drug dealer. His fortunes began two brighten slightly in 1990 when he got a job with the rip group Digital Underground, as 2 road manager and dancer. But his real break came the following vear. when he was picked up by Interscope—a small com- pany that had just been rounded by the record producer Jimmy Iovine and the entertainment magnate Ted Field (an heir to the Marshall Field fortune) as a joint vencure with Time Wamer. Tom Whalley, who signed Tupac at Interscope, had brought in a demo tape Tupac had made, and Ted Field IW gave it to his teen-age daughter. She told her father how much she liked it. Whalley recalls being struck as much by Tupac's looks and br his “presence” as bv his talent. He remembers saying to his assistant, “Have von ever seen eves hke thar?” Interscope had positioned itself as something of a maverick in the music business, producing mostly “alrernative” rock and gangsta rap. which drew on the culture of the gangs uf South Cen- tral Los Angeles for its material. Rap was originally an East Coast phenom- enon, an element of the hip-hop cul- ture of the nineteen-seventies, which also included graffiti and break danc- ing. Although hip-hop music broke into the mainstream in 1979 with the inrernational hit “Rapper's Delight,” it was not until the late eighties, with the emergence of gangsta rap, that it showed signs of becoming hugely com- mercial—especially when it gained a wide audience of white youths, much as blues, jazz, and early rock and roll had. In 1991, Interscope released Tupac's first album, “2pacalvpse Now,” which was replete with militant lyrics de- picting violence between voung black men and the police. This was the al- HIN YE Ein | A violent rivalry emerged éerween East Coast rappers like Biggie Smalls (left) and L.A.-based stars the Snoop Dogey i bum thar Vice-President Dan Quayle said had “no place in our society.” —T the deposition Tupac gave in 1995, when he was asked to interpret sev- eral of the songs on “2pacalypse Now,” he explained that ir was his practice to introduce a central character through whom he could develop a narrative, be- cause he believed thar “betore vou can understand what I mean. vou have to know how I lived or how the people I’m talking to live. . agree with me, but just to understand what I'm talking about. Compassion, to show compassion.” He also said that he © was not advocating violence against the police but was simply telling stories that described reality for voung black men— and cautionary stories at that, in which violence against the police often leads to death or imprisonment. On one track he says, “They claim that I’m violent just cuz I refuse to be silent.” The song on the album that proved to be the most popular was entitled “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” Tupac said that he had writ- ten the song after reading a newspaper story about a twelve-vear-old girl who became impregnated by her cousin and threw her newborn baby down an in- .. You don’t have to |