TUPAC SHAKUR ALBUM CRACK COCAINE MARKET

He was in jail when his third album, Me Against the World, was released in March. Tupac keeps you searching, even now, for the line between him and the him he put out there for youLater that month, Shakur began serving his sentence. He dared you to find the lies, to prove he's crazy. He made you want to kill him, defend him, make him your baby. The themes of most of Tupacs songs are On his fudgy skin. Rolling Stone Magazine named him the 86th Greatest Artist of All Time.

No matter what wrong shit he was ever caughtUp in, he always had his other raised-by-Panthers/fuck-tha-police self to fall back on.Tupac's five albums are equal parts striking and adequate. And Tupac's adult biography has everything-money, music, movies, malfeasance-that makes us love and hate someone. Because of his mother's affiliationWith the group, Tupac's early existence was mingled with the plain logic of breakfast for everyone, in the ballsy resolve of guns in California's state capital, in the glamour and fraternity of leather pea-coats and tams forAny brother wanting to stand up and fight-or look ferocious and fab. From the start, his life was made-for-mythologizing, shrouded as it was in the tragedy of the Black Panther party. Hero.He's another hero we don't need, and 'Pac's built, in death even, to last.

He managed them, like he managed his blackness-with a fantastic, desperate dexterity. Tupac, like many MCs, rode his own dick, seeming to care more about how he was coming off to his boys backstage than he did about the average Negro who paid to stand up in a hot club and catch 'Pac's fever for aTupac's different lives were very much in league, though none would have been vibrant without the others. Onstage, his performancesWere spotty. He never quite lived up to the brilliance of his Bishop in Ernest Dickerson's 1992 Juice.

Tupac Shakur Album Crack Cocaine Market

The Oakland Police Department Drug Task Force was using battering rams to bust down the doors of dope houses back then. (Actual gangsters, their stacks of cash, and the music business have been linked since kids in the 1940sGave music a real economy.) It's no coincidence that as the crack cocaine market exploded, people like DU, Too Short, and MC Hammer blew up-as well as lesser-known talents like MC Ant, Ant Banks, K-Cloud & the Crew, Premo, andCapitol Tax. Oakland was known as Coke-Land back then, and though it was a bridge or two away from Marin, Tupac got over to the East Bay aLot, first hanging with his half brother Mocedes and a crew known as Strictly Dope, then with this white girl, Leila Steinberg, from Sonoma County, who was managing him, and then with the droll brothers who made up Digital Underground.To what degree it is true will probably go forever untold, but the rise of the Bay Area dope game and Bay Area hip hop were massively intertwined. It was about defiance, women, paranoia, ego, and anger-and going out in a blaze of what he imagined to be glory.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tupac Shakur was chiseling out an existence in Marin City, California's craggy slums. But his life was about juggling plums while bullets nipped at his ankles.

He came to kick it with the DU crew one night on a plush Sausalito houseboat Jimi 'Chopmaster J'Dright had rented while recording an album under the name Force One Network for Qwest Records. Club Nouveau's 1986 'Situation#9' (a Top 10 R&B hit) was another admonition: 'The life that you're living / Is gonna catch up to you / And boy, I think you need some help.' The immense vocals balanced the paranoid lyrics, and that chemistryMay have inspired Tupac to ask Roniece Livias to sing in the background (along with David Hollister, who would go on to sing lead in the first incarnation of Teddy Riley's BLACKstreet) of his debut single, 1991's 'Brenda'sTupac's 'Brenda' deserts her newborn, sells dope, then sex, and ends up (in the video for the song) the silent star of a crime scene. MCs and songwriters responded to the havoc crack was wreaking on the East Bay.Hammer's contribution was the innocuous 'Pray,' but Tony Toni Tone went to the soul of the matter with 1988's 'Little Walter,' an ode to a dope dealer who gets shot upon opening his front door. There seemedA ceaseless stream of mothers, groggy with grief, wailing on the news about a good child who was dead.

The verse he rapped on DU's 1991 'Same Song' had been like a single french fry for a growing boy: 'Now I clown around / When I hang around / With the Underground.' Tupac felt he had more to say. 'She's one a them girls we all know.' He was 20, IThink. 'Y'all some simple muthafuckas,' he said. Tupac curled himself forward and laughed. Tupac held on to a frayed piece of ruled'No, she ain't somebody I know,' he answered somebody's question.

Brenda was 'in love with a molester / Who's sexing her crazy.'And when Tupac says 'Prostitute found slain / And Brenda's her name / She's got a baby,' with Hollister and Roniece battling out in the background, moaning and repeating the name Brenda over and over, the song is boldAnd melancholy-a crystalline morality tale. His writing, though, was clear and picturesque. His words, especially in 'Brenda,' are over-enunciated and urgent. 2Pacalypse didn't sound like a DU spin-off because while the Underground Railroad production squad stuck with the liquid bassiness that had succeeded for Digital, they also went for a sound more incensed, impassioned, broken,Tupac's MC skills were just coming together back then. All the best songs on that album-'Young Black Male,' 'RebelOf the Underground,' and the unwavering 'Trapped,' with Shock in the back murmuring 'Nah / You can't keep the black man down'-are rank with the funk of a young man cooped up too long in somebody else'sConcept.

Q wants 'juice,' but the kind Bishop gets drunk on is too corrosive. While the training Tupac received during his high-school years at Baltimore's School for the Arts no doubt emergedAt the unscheduled audition, the way he hustled himself into the reading demonstrated a kind of alertness to opportunity that can't be taught in the classroom.In the film, Tupac and Epps battle it out for most lovely-both of them black as truth with brown eyes, matching each other stare for stare. Tupac, who said heWent along 'just to trip,' ended up being cast opposite costar Omar Epps's tormented Q as Bishop in Juice. Mun read before Ernest Dickerson, but didn't get called back.

'Ain't nothin' nobody can do about it now.' And like so many of the words that came out of Tupac's mouth which seemed to predict hisEnd, they provide a peek into his state of mind. The movieHouse gasps were loud and in unison. And later, when Q, trying to get his life back together, slams his locker shut only to find Bishop standing there, it's a vision of one hell-born.

Listen and you can almost hear Shock-G in the studio telling 'Pac to lightenUp a little bit-take a swim, have some sex, go platinum, live a little. On 'Representin' 93,' Tupac names the brothers he loves-andIn 1993, he was still referring to DU as his 'real niggaz.' 'I Get Around' was pretty much a Digital Underground song with Tupac on lead. Dickerson placed him throughout Juice as a cloaked figure-at one point put it, Tupac Shakur knew to give us a little God with our gangsta rap.Tupac was at his best on Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., still touched by Digital Underground's mischeivous aura but standing on his own two feet, not yet doing time on Death Row.

WhatHurt the film most was the coldness between Shakur and Jackson. He succeeded to a large degree, considering John Singleton's banal story line. Much was made of Tupac playing a RegularGuy, not someone like Bishop, who was closer to what people believed to be Tupac's 'real' personality, and therefore easy to play. He looks pretty, but it doesn't matter because Regina King steals the movie from him, Janet Jackson, and Joe Torry. We watched him in his black Versace, knowing exactly which was correct.In 1993's Poetic Justice Tupac is bald, extra slew-footed, and wears a huge nose ring.