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= = eas “So this is infidelity.” considered within that world to be a no- vitiate. When he moved to L.A., Tupac said in his deposition, he “didn't have a slingshot, | didn’t have a knife, I didn’t even have sharp nails.” But soon he had bought 2 gun and was practic- ing shooting it on firing ranges. He muscled his slight, lithe dancer's body with weight training and began to countenance, when caught in repose— delicate, fey, androgynous, a face with long-lashed, limpid eyes—tended to be- tray him. But he was adamantly “Tt irked him when they said, ‘Fake gangsta rapper,” Mopreme told me. “He was saying, Tm from the dirt! Yall should be applauding me! I made it through the ghetto. I made it through school with no lights. I'm real. We the same pesson’ " By 1993, Tupac seemed to have be- come obsessed with gang life. He was to the next. He got involved in a fight with 2 limo driver in Hollywood, tried to hit a local rapper with a baseball bat during a concert in Michigan, and col- lected criminal charges and civil suits. According to Man Man and others, many of these incidents were a conse- quence of someone challenging Tupac's right to rap hard lyrics. “People would test him,” Man Man explains. “And Pac felt, I have to prove that I'm hard. 1 would say to him, ‘Most gangsters are people who wish they didn’t have to be hard.’” At Tupac’s instigation, he, Man Man, and another friend had all got a “50 NIGGAZ” tattoo (symbolizing a black confederation among the fifty states). “Nigga,” in Tupac's lexicon, stood for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accom- plished.” In “Words of Wisdom,” he raps, “Niggas, what are we going to do? Walk blind into a lic or fight. Fight and die if we must. Die like niggas.” “I never could have had that word tattooed on me be- fore,” Man Man told me. “But Pac said, "We're going to take that word that they used and turn it around on them - :’. to make it positive.’ ” ste When Tupac got his “thug life” tar- too, his manager, Watani Tychimba, 2 former Black Panther who had been THE NEW YORKER. JULY 7, 1997 close to Tupac since he was a small boy, was apoplectic. “T said, ‘What have you done?’ ” Tychimba recalled. “We talked about it, and it became clear that he did it to make sure he never forgot the dis- possessed, never forgot where he came from. He was straddling two worlds. And he saw that we never make it as black people unless we sell out. He was saying he never would.” Tupac collabo- rated with four other rappers on the al- bum “Thug Life, Vol. 1° (which grew out of an earlier project called “Under- ground Railroad”). The idea was that the album would enable gang members to escape street life by becoming musicians. There were to be subsequent volumes of “Thug Life,” with a new group of gang- member each time. Some of the songs that Tupac and his fellow-artists wanted to include were rejected by In- terscope. Tupac acknowledged that he "wouldn't play ‘Thug Life’ to kids. Not that it’s anything that would make them crazy or anything, but I wouldn't." Still, he knew that it was the harder lyr- ics that sold the best, and were perceived by the audience to most closely mirror life in the ghetto. “Pac became the spokesperson for the ghetto. He rapped our pain,” Syke (Tyruss Himes), a West Coast rapper who a: on the “Thug Life” album, told me. “In the L.A. ghetto, four or five people get killed every week. You don’t hear about it. Only their families know.” Through Syke and others, Tupac was now experiencing that life directly. In several of his songs, Tupac says, “Re- member Kato.” “Big Kato was like my brother,” Syke said. “He got killed for my car. It had Dayton rims—they cost twenty-five hundred dollars. They killed him for it.” Mental Iiiness, another rap- per with whom Tupac became friendly through Syke, was also killed; and Syke's brother killed himself. (“I guess from the stress,” Syke said.) “If you're rapping this hard stuff, you have to live it,” Syke declared. “Other- wise people check your résumé and say, ‘You don’t look like you're hard from your résumé, let's see if you are.’ Pac al- ways felt he had to prove something to his homeboys.” He points to the “rags,” or bandannas, Tupac wore. “He started wearing red around Crips, and blue around Bloods—so that when he’ was around Crips, Bloods wouldn't think he was a Crip, and blue around Bloods, so Hb me ee es