RAP WARS

On the night of Sunday, March 9th, rap star Chris Wallace aka The Notorious BIG, aka Biggie Smalls was shot several times in the upper body while leaving the Soul Train awards party in the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Despite efforts by paramedics to revive him, Wallace expired on his way to Cedars Sinai Hospital. He was 24.
Rightly or wrongly, the shooting has been perceived in many quarters as a revenge attack for the murder of fellow rapper Tupac Shakur in Nevada six months ago. The two artists respective labels, Bad Boy Entertainment and Death Row Records, have been at each other s throats for the past couple of years, in the midst of a prolonged feud which has threatened to tear the US hip-hop community in two.
An artist s impression of the killer (a black man in his 20s driving a dark car) has been issued, and police are pursuing the revenge angle of the case with considerable interest. We obviously cannot eliminate the fact that there have been a number of murders involving rap singers, said Lieutenant Ross Moen of the LAPD last week.
When the smoke cleared, however, several other possible motives arose with regard to the killing of Wallace. It subsequently emerged that the FBI were investigating the rapper due to an alleged link with New York s Gambino Mafia. Other factors have been cited, such as drugs and gang rivalry, while more recent speculation has it that the rapper was shot by an ex-bodyguard to whom he owed a substantial amount of money. There is also the wild card theory, too simplistic for many to accept that the murder was simply the act of a crazed rap fan.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that in the eyes of most observers, the killings of Shakur and Wallace are inextricably linked. Certainly, the timing of The Notorious BIG s death is just a little too convenient for some. His murder took place only nine days after Death Row owner Marion Suge Knight was sentenced to nine years in prison for four probation violations.
The two shootings represent the culmination, and hopefully the conclusion, of a long-running antagonism between the two hip-hop communities on the two coasts of the United States. It was fuelled by continuous derogatory jibes hurled by both sides from 1993 to the present day the Californians slagged the New Yorkers for not selling any records, and the New Yorkers rubbished the Californians for being deliberately commercial-minded, opportunistic and unoriginal.
The West Coast invasion was spearheaded by Death Row Records, which at the peak of its powers had a stable of artists lucrative enough to give any accountant multiple orgasms: Dr. Dre, 2Pac, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nate Dogg, RBX, Hammer, Lady Of Rage and Tha Dogg Pound. (Incidentally, Dr. Dre s half-brother Warren G was overlooked by Death Row, who felt he didn t have any potential as an artist, and so he signed with Def Jam instead.)
The label s MD was one Marion Suge Knight, a thuggish, Don King-like character with a reputation for strong-arm tactics when it came to business wrangles all of which came out in court several weeks ago.
Around the same time as Death Row rose to pre-eminence, a man named Sean Combs Puffy to his homies was putting together a rival empire on the other side of the country. The New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment label was slightly more swingbeat and R n B-oriented than its rival. The jewels in its crown were The Notorious BIG, soul singer Faith Evans (Biggie Smalls wife), female swingbeat trio Total, and boy band 112.
While Suge Knight and Puffy Combs were busy proving themselves to be cut-throat entrepreneurs with an eye for the main chance, hip-hop was undergoing the most pronounced schism of its short history, with the two coasts of America starting to produce very different styles of music. A significant development in this was the arrival of the Wu-Tang Clan, a Staten Island-based rap collective with an ever-shifting line-up who each seemed to bring out their own solo record each week (so far, there has only been one unified Wu-Tang Clan album, 1994 s Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers). This band, more than any other, did the most to rejuvenate East Coast hip-hop.
The West Coast rappers as well as most of the acts on Bad Boy Entertainment s roster specialised in G-Funk (G for gangsta) while the East Coast acts forte, for the most part, was characterised by the memorable tag horrorcore . With its wide open spaces and soft, shimmering heat, Los Angeles was the perfect atmospheric breeding ground for G-Funk, while conversely, the claustrophobic, bleak morass of New York would inspire paranoid, dread-filled masterpieces from the likes of Method Man, Ghost Face Killah and Gravediggaz.
Where G-Funk is warm, mellow, textured, rich and always extremely melodic, horrorcore is edgy, taut, strained, nervous, tense and frequently discordant. On the new Warren G album, the mental images conjured up are ones of customised cars cruising lazily through the suburbs of Southern California, sun beaming down, palm trees swaying lazily in the gentle breeze. On a horrorcore classic such as Genius/GZA s Liquid Swords, however, what you see in your mind s eye are mental pictures of shadowy figures shuffling through darkened subway tunnels, flashing sirens, stormy dark weather, looming tower blocks, yellow tape which reads POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS . That s the difference.
Kickstarted by the success of Dr. Dre s 1992 G-Funk prototype The Chronic, the West soon dominated proceedings. Thanks mainly to albums such as Snoop Doggy Dogg s Doggystyle, records coming out of the West Coast quickly began outselling those from the East by something like five to one. It remained so until around 1995, when the impetus of NY-based acts like the Wu-Tang Clan (and its numerous offshoots), Jeru The Damaja and Mobb Deep turned the tide.
It has been suggested on numerous occasions that the label supremos themselves personally encouraged their acts to produce ever cruder releases, exhorting them to increase the violence and sexism quotients. Suffice it to say that the, eh, chequered CVs of Messrs Knight and Combs do not exactly give the lie to such a notion.
The ironic thing is that musically, Biggie Smalls was pure West Coast. His three biggest hits, Juicy , One More Chance and Can t You See , could have been lifted from any Death Row release.
Examining the lives and deaths of these two figures, several incontrovertible facts emerge. Firstly, the Bad Boy camp almost certainly had nothing to do with the murder of Shakur. Secondly, his death and subsequent absurd canonisation as the black Elvis constitutes a depressing example of the undignified, perspective-less cult of personality which surrounds these artists. And thirdly, Biggie Smalls records beat Tupac s ones into a cocked hat.
The Notorious BIG s debut long-player, Ready To Die, is a competent enough hip-hop offering with several rather inspired nuggets lurking within its 70 minutes ( Juicy , Big Poppa , Warning ). It is a concept album which follows the journey of a black man from childhood to violent adolescence to turbulent adulthood and, finally, death. The Notorious BIG himself is pictured on the sleeve as an infant.
Although not in the same league as acknowledged hip-hop masterpieces such as The Chronic and OG: Original Gangster, Ready To Die is a reasonably proficient album, decent enough to make one wonder what Biggie Smalls would have come up with in future years had he lived.
In contrast, Tupac Shakur s back catalogue is a hopeless mess. None of his three albums Strictly 4 My Niggaz, Me Against The World and All Eyez On Me withstands even the most charitable of assessments. While not wishing to speak ill of the deceased, a dead no-mark is still a no-mark, and dying does not retrospectively make you a better or more fully-rounded person.
His most recent album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, was released under the nom de guerre of Makaveli, a reference to the great Italian kingmaker and strategist . This reference apparently does not extend as far as spelling the man s name correctly. On the cover, Shakur is portrayed in cartoon form as a crucified Christ figure. In no way is this portrait intended as an expression of disrespect for Jesus Christ, explains the disclaimer below it. Well, that s all right then.
Not content with mere halfwitted tastelessness, his worldview was riddled with misogyny, paranoia and bigotry. All the greats. On Fuck The World (from Me Against The World), in a reference to his conviction for sexual battery following an incident in a New York hotel in 1994, he barks: Who you callin a rapist?/Ain t that a bitch?/You devils are so two-faced.
In a similar vein, the song Toss It Up , which is taken from The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, is a vicious diatribe against Dr. Dre (with whom he had collaborated only months beforehand on the single California Love ). In it, he accuses the rotund producer/rapper of being gay.
The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory has sold seven million copies, the majority of them in America, since its November 1996 release.
Shakur s leitmotiv was something called Thug Life , which he prattled on incessantly about in interviews and in his music. Thug Life appears to be a philosophy (of sorts) which attempts to justify the aggressive, belligerent gangsta lifestyle by explaining that because the transgressor is a product of his violent environment (i.e. the ghetto), his actions can therefore be excused.
The rapper also appeared to see himself as some sort of eternally misunderstood street warrior, patrolling the projects of America like a demented nightwatchman. He prefaced another of his songs, If I Die 2 Nite , with the words A coward dies a thousand deaths . . . a soldier dies but once.
Following his death, the hip-hop and R&B magazines of America were filled with ridiculous outpourings of asinine breast-beating and mournful gibberish, all of it uniformly proclaiming the dead rapper to be the black Cobain, a martyr for a generation and an urban missionary spreading the word to the kids. You know the kind of thing. Try this letter for size, taken from the December 1996 edition of VIBE:
I don t feel sad about losing Tupac, because I m a true thug-life outlaw and he always told the true ones not to cry for him when he s gone. Although I feel like I lost a comrade, his words are still embedded in my mental (sic), and he will always be here with me spiritually. Thug Life lives on!
Shakur s final video, I Ain t Mad At Cha , depicted him being shot dead, going to heaven and subsequently becoming a guardian angel, and was premiered on MTV three days after he died. The song also contains the line Picture us inside a ghetto heaven/ In my chest I feel pain. Shakur s mortal wounds were sustained in you guessed it the chest.
However, for the benefit of conspiracy theorists, it s fair to say that any suggestion of Shakur having an exact premonition of his own ultimate demise is romantic rubbish and nothing more. The man peppered the majority of his songs with references to his own impending, violent death. Indeed, there were times during his career when he seemed to be preoccupied with little else, as tracks such as If I Die 2 Nite and Bury Me A G will attest.
The feud between The Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur grew out of a song on which Shakur raps: You claim to be a player but I fucked your wife. The Notorious BIG is alluded to by name on the track, and his wife now widow is the aforementioned Faith Evans, a highly successful R n B vocalist in her own right in America.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that had Shakur refrained from recording that single line, both his and Biggie Smalls lives might have taken drastically different turns.
Realistically, though, it seems highly unlikely that either Wallace or Combs themselves had any concrete involvement in Tupac Shakur s murder. Neither the complete will to carry out such an act, nor the organisational nous to arrange it properly, existed in those quarters. Add to that the massive logistical problems of shooting somebody in Las Vegas, which is an independent Mafia enclave in all but name, and you stack the odds heavily against Biggie Smalls personal involvement.
Certainly, the potential motive was powerful in the machismo-dominated world of gangsta rap, no-one in their right mind would write a line like You claim to be a player but I fucked your wife and direct it at a fellow artist unless they possessed the best team of bodyguards that money could buy but there are just too many contrary factors to connect Bad Boy Entertainment to the shooting in any way.
These days, Death Row Records is a smouldering wreck. Its owner and supremo is in jail, its debts are piling up, its leading light is dead, and save for Snoop Doggy Dogg, all its remaining stars of note have decamped to new pastures RBX left two years ago following a dressing-room row with Suge Knight, while Dr. Dre, easily the most talented person connected with the label, left hurriedly in 1996, thus ending his long creative partnership with Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Late last year, Suge Knight was banking on Snoop Doggy Dogg to turn his label s fortunes around. The 24-year-old s second album, Tha Doggfather, was set for release. Knight expected it to surpass the sales of Snoop s debut, 1994 s Doggystyle (4.8 million copies sold).
To put it mildly, Tha Doggfather failed to do so. It went down like a kiddie porn snuff movie at a Fianna Fail dinner dance, being rubbished by most of the critics in the USA, and it sold only a fraction of what its predecessor had achieved. And with good reason. It is unbearably awful, and can lay equitable claim to being one of the worst records ever made. The best thing about it is its sleeve a magnificent Coppola/The Godfather pastiche.
Following the shooting of The Notorious BIG, Snoop Doggy Dogg postponed a 38-date American tour out of fears for his life. The tour was later rescheduled. Snoop reportedly now wants to include more acts on the bill in order to calm things down and present a united East/West front, as well as opening each show with a film about the two dead rappers. This admittedly laudable move is probably too little, too late.
Despite the hysterical brouhaha that accompanied it, Biggie Smalls death will almost assuredly have no meaningful cultural impact whatsoever on the rap world, except to copper-fasten the absolute certainty that his second album, Life After Death, will go straight in at number one on the Billboard album charts, upon its release in America this week.
It could be argued (though not by me) that these slayings add the final gruesome stamp of authenticity to gangsta rap music, taking matters one step further than Snoop Doggy Dogg s recent acquittal for accessory to murder. The theory runs as follows: just as Kurt Cobain s suicide lent his tormented, tribulatory lyrics the ring of truth, the deaths of these two rather unsavoury characters proves beyond all doubt that they knew of what they spoke (or rapped). They lived the game, man.
In any case, it s fair to assume that gangsta rap will continue to sell heavily, as it has done for the last four years while so-called conscious acts such as Arrested Development, Digable Planets and The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy have all gone down the plughole in one way or another. Only Public Enemy, who aren t the force they were, have remained true to their original vision and survived. And only the musically dreary Fugees, whose The Score album shifted 7,000,000 copies by virtue of sheer dumb luck, are bucking the trend in any meaningful fashion.
Things have got to the stage where a glorified A&R man like Puffy Combs can have a massively successful musical career of his own (his current single, Can t Nobody Hold Me Down , has been roosting in the top 10 of the US singles chart for the past two months). This is roughly equivalent to David Geffen recording a grunge-rock long player and seeing it go triple platinum.
Although rap albums shift more copies in the United States than probably any other genre of music, this is not as a result of an exclusively African-American consumer base. Of the USA s 255 million people, only about 12% are black, and in order for these albums to sell the amounts they do, a degree of economic miscegenation has to take place.
And so, white Americans well-documented torrid love affair with gangsta rap is continuing apace. Unable to enter the ghettoes themselves for practical reasons, they settle for records such as Warren G s Regulate . . . G-Funk Era and Ice Cube s The Predator to create the sensurround experience and enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of it all for themselves.
This subgroup of American society is known by the derogatory term wiggers (derived from the words white and niggers ). Those unfortunate enough to have ever encountered any of these sad specimens, whether on holiday or elsewhere, will know the type instantly. Swaddling themselves in the clothes beloved of their favourite rappers (it s Tommy Hilfiger and Timberland ahoy!), they walk the walk and talk the unadulterated bollocks, usually in the form of painfully off-the-mark attempts to mimic the argot of the Brooklyn housing projects. Predictably enough, the vast majority of them appear to come from wealthy, respectable, upper middle-class backgrounds.
These are the people who sent NWA s Efil4Zaggin to number one in the States back in 1990, and theirs is a lineage which can be traced all the way back to Lou Reed s I Wanna Be Black . People, it s a weird one.
Meanwhile, the real innovators and pioneers such as DJ Shadow (whose white skin probably counts against him in such a racially bigoted country as America) and Jeff Mills are overlooked. Similarly, Goldie and Tricky have made little real headway over there.
Ironically, Ice-T and Ice Cube, the men who probably did more than anybody else to promote and nurture gangsta rap remember Cop Killer ? have seen their commercial fortunes dwindle away in direct inverse proportion to those of the acts they helped spawn.
Ice-T s last record, IV: Return Of The Real, surprisingly bombed, and given the speed at which hip-hop culture moves onwards and upwards, there appears to be no real way back for him to reclaim the eminence he once enjoyed. (Ice-T s take on this whole sorry saga, incidentally, is that Tupac had no business dealing with gangs; he was an entertainer. Hear, hear.) Ice Cube, for his part, increasingly resembles a bad caricature of Mary Whitehouse s idea of a gangsta rapper.
In the meantime, Biggie Smalls has gone to Jesus. If I were the head of operations at Baggot Racing I d be offering a selection of odds on which rapper will be next to get it. And if you thought that last line was in rather poor taste, then you d better pray that you never have to hear any of these guys records. n