Another uncreative, depressing dead rapper rehash.

At times, I can get a little mean in my reviews. Part of it, I think, is that when I do get some bandwidth in this crowded communications soup, I want my words to have some impact, even if it means a little hyperbole.

In fact, it reminds me of what an old friend of mine used to do with his own writing. Except when he tangled with Tupac, it was for real.

* * * * *

I met a lot of artists in the course of my two decades in the music business, but I never met Tupac Shakur.

I didn’t think much of him. When it became fashionable to compare him with Big, for instance, there was no question in my mind. One of them could rhyme, one couldn’t. My approach was that of an East Coast snob, for sure. It took me many years to really understand why people adored Tupac so, and why that worship has only increased since his death, dwarfing Big.

Ironically, the person who taught me the value and genius of Tupac was Chino XL.

Of course, Chino XL is probably best known for his celebrated beef with Tupac, having said some things about him on his first album that caused Tupac to fire back on the last song he released before his death, “Hit ‘Em Up.” So this requires some explaining.

Here’s what Chino said about Tupac. He said it on one of the last songs he recorded for “Here To Save You All,” a collaboration with Ras Kass called “Riiiot”:

“By this industry/ I’m trying not to get f**ked/ Like Tupac in jail.”

For the record, Chino has always maintained that what he meant by this line was that Tupac was “trying NOT to get f**ked” in jail, not that Tupac was “GETTING f**ked” in jail.

But anyway, the line is ambiguous, and knowing Chino’s mind state at the time, he probably didn’t give a f**k.

It was 1995. Chino XL was lyrically untouchable, in my opinion. Chino’s too. So it caused him no end of frustration that, after being signed for four years to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, he had yet to make an impact. His stuff with Art of Origin got very little play. After his partner Kerri went AWOL, Chino had to record his own material on a shoestring. When Chino turned in the demo of “No Complex,” it was with no help from me.

As tired of fighting as I was — both with the label for resources and with Chino for a single — “No Complex” was one of those songs where something finally clicked. It was as if Chino XL coalesced suddenly into who he was meant to be: He found his voice, his image, his style in one fell swoop.

Chino was angry. Angry at me, angry at Rick, angry at Kerri, at Warner Bros., at radio DJs who wouldn’t play his stuff, at mediocre MCs who got on simply by being hype man to the next man. Not to say Chino hadn’t always possessed an acid tongue. This was, after all, the guy who said, while still with Art of Origin, “I’m throwin’ your sh*t out the window/Like Eric Clapton’s son.”

But “No Complex” was Chino’s last straw. Chino made a vow to himself: If no one is listening, he seemed to say, then f**k it, I am going to say what I want to say about anyone and anything. I will say the things that everybody thinks but are afraid to say. Anybody who has crossed me is going to get theirs, double. And in the small bandwidth that I have in this industry filled with so much bullsh*t, I will scream it at the top of my lungs so that, at the very least, I can emerge feeling like I’ve accomplished something for myself.

On the strength of “No Complex,” I got some money from Rick to fly Chino and his producer B-Wiz out to L.A. It was enough to keep them up in a cheap motel in Glendale, record the rest of the album on two ADAT machines in my apartment, and mix the tracks in a small studio in Hollywood. That became Chino’s first album, “Here To Save You All.”

“No Complex,” the first single, was an absolute non-stop tirade. Nobody had done anything so expansive, been so willing to make so many enemies. It was, I think, the hip-hop equivalent of a suicide bombing. The shrapnel went everywhere. I think it was King Tech, after hearing this song, who dubbed him “The King Of Ill-Lines and Punchlines.”

Still, getting Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown upset at you doesn’t carry with it quite the same consequences as hitting a guy who’s about to emerge from prison backed by the most notorious gangster in the music business.

I’m not sure when Tupac became aware of this one little line in Chino’s song. “Riiiot” was, after all, the #1 requested song on the Sway and King Tech Wake Up Show months before his album’s release in the spring of 1996. At some point, Sway interviewed Tupac for the show, and Tupac made it clear to Sway that Chino was fair game.

I am sure this was both blessing and curse for Chino XL. On the one hand, Chino had absolutely no beef with Tupac. Like I said, the lyric was written with haste, not with disrespect. On the other, Chino had been waiting for a chance to test his skills in the open, and now here it was. If Tupac wanted a fight, so be it.

Lyrically, it wasn’t going to be a contest. Chino and I got along, I think, because I had a mean streak too. We were in the car and the instrumental for Tupac’s “Dear Mama” came on. I started rapping, “Dear Mama/I wish I was born with two voices...” at which point Chino began coughing up a lung. It was a joke only Chino could have gotten, a play on the fact that Tupac always double tracked his vocals. The subtle implication being, of course, that he needed to.

But I think Chino understood that Tupac wasn’t an emcee, but a poet of certain eloquence. Because Chino had studied Tupac so well, because he respected him, liked him, he could begin to stockpile some lyrical weapons of mass destruction, should it ever come to that.

It became clear, though, that the fight wouldn’t be verbal. When we’d go places in California, we’d hear whispers as we entered a club, always some dude muttering “Tupac” under his breath. Chino, from what I recall, began to hear ominous threats from the Death Row camp. Then came “Hit Em Up,” the last song that Tupac released alive, where he followed up his “Chino XL, f**k you too” with the statement, “My .44 make sure all y’all kids don’t grow.”

Chino XL, father of three, took that shit very seriously, and proceeded to squash the sh*t with Tupac through some backchannel communication that was, and is, none of my business. To this day, Chino says that he and Pac had peaced things up before Pac’s death.

I think there was a part of Chino that missed being able to verbally joust with a worthy opponent. After all, he had saved up nearly a year’s worth of comeback rhymes that never saw the light of day, and that’s hard for an emcee to hold back. To his credit, Chino never recorded a response to “Hit Em Up.” The only time I ever heard of him let some slip was at a live performance at New York’s Wetlands in the fall of 1996, which began:

“Ni**a you ain’t never seeeeeeeeeen drama/
F**k you and your dope fieeeeeeeeeeend mama.”

A few days later, Tupac was shot in Vegas. I had flown back to Los Angeles, and remember, a few days later, the voice of Rick’s assistant echoing through the office.

“He’s dead,” she said.

I got the call a few hours later from Chino as he traveled by car from New York to Philly. He was crying.

“You know I loved that dude, Charnas,” he said. I told him that I did.

A few months later, we were in Vegas. The Makaveli album has just come out, and in the wee hours of the morning, when the rest of us went up to the hotel rooms to sleep, Chino stayed behind in the car to listen to the whole thing, alone.

In 1997, Chino narrowly escaped death when several gunmen shot through his SUV outside a house party in Jersey. There was some talk, I remember, of this coming from some of Pac’s people who didn’t know that shit had been squashed, and were looking for revenge. But I’m not sure if Chino even knows.

Added (08/Feb/10, 9:11 Pm)
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That's the beauty of his artistry, he connected with listeners on all levels. Mainstream, underground, it didn't matter. He reached everyone.

An emcee =/= a rapper. Yes, hip hop CULTURE is comprised of the four elements but 1. Rapping is not one of the 4 elements, emceeing is and 2. Within hip hop CULTURE there is hip hop MUSIC. Rap music =/= hip hop music, it is a part of pop culture. If rap music was the one and only music of hip hop culture, then where oh where would instrumental hip hop (which has no vocals but is most definitely a part of hip hop culture), including turntablism fit oh great omniscient Alcatraz? It's hip hop MUSIC which fits into the larger category of hip hop CULTURE.

There were plenty of examples in the past of artists who didn't accept the labels attributed to their music, yet we still commonly associate, for example, Herbie Hancock with Jazz even though he wanted to be known as a funk artist. If the symptoms are there, the diagnosis is clear. Opinion has very little to do with this matter.

That's a false analogy. We're discussing an account of the opinions people held of 2pac during his lifetime from people that were around to hear these opinions, not an account of 2pac's character and attitude from a 3rd person source.

When did I ever say "my friends said..."? I did include a few of the "big homies'" opinions, but I've heard this from multiple different people that claimed to be a part of the underground or real hip hop scene prior to 2pac's death, some that I knew, some that I didn't, that all said that the opinion within the hip hop purist community was that Pac was fake.

When did "the hip hop purist community thought 2pac was fake while he was alive" become "the entire world thought 2pac was fake when he was alive"? That would be a bold and unfounded claim that I couldn't possibly back up and would easily be countered simply using record sales (10 million copies of All Eyez On Me sold in a week) or, hell, even my personal opinion at the time (yes, I was a 2pac fan back then and still am. I was also only about 8 years old and I do believe I am older than you). If you still think that it wasn't even consensus in the purist community, you are really overestimating the size of that particular group. You act like that some big huge group of people when in reality it is a small, niche community. It's bigger than "me and my boys and Pensmoke's people" though.

Being "real" hip hop has little to do with lyrical content. It has to do with being true to yourself and sticking to the tradition of what hip hop is. To be an emcee rather than a rapper you must also meet a certain skill level. You can talk about whatever the fuck you want and still be an emcee as long as you are skilled at what you do. Rakim, Common, Immortal Technique, Mos Def, Talib, etc. are all emcees but so are Bun B, Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Biggie, Bone Thugs, Wu Tang, etc. and I would argue that so are Ludacris, Kid Cudi, Drake, and even Chamillionaire to an extent. It's not like a distinction that is set in stone (you either are or aren't an emcee), but rather there's a spectrum and some are more toward the emcee side than the rapper side making them emcees. Soulja Boy, for example, would be on the far "rapper" end of the spectrum and someone like Rakim would be at the extremes of the "emcee" end. It still has no bearing on how good someone is as an artist either. I can have an opinion that Lil Wayne is the worst to ever touch a mic but someone else has the opposite opinion and neither of us is right or wrong. That is all a matter of opinion.

In that case it's my opinion that it's all just music, fuck labels. Fuck hip hop, fuck rock, fuck jazz, fuck classical, fuck polka, fuck alternative, fuck pop, it's all just music. And, as a matter of fact, words, after all, are just labels, so fuck words. I'm going to just grunt and moan and use body language to get my point across from now on. Hiodnjforfbhrebnf fiofvb fy diuf fiufbfuj fuif fujdif!

You've been a disrespectful ass since you entered this thread.

None of us is implying that either. However, it's far more objective than what you make it out to be. Your opinion has little bearing on what hip hop is. And when we speak of hip hop, we need to make the distinction between hip hop CULTURE and hip hop MUSIC. Rap is not a part of hip hop, though it is related. It is a part of pop culture. I'll explain in a moment.

That's your opinion and that is fine. I personally think he's pretty wack, though he's not as bad as a majority of the rappers out there these days, but Pen has a bit of a personal gripe with Project Pat because he's from Memphis and knows from personal experience that him and Three Six are snakes.

No, it has to do with lyrical content to an extent and the sound of the music. That's in every genre with lyrics. And in hip hop, gangsta, or g-funk, boom bap, trip hop, horrorcore, acid, etc. all have distinctive sounds and lyrical content, just as punk and metal are distinctly different and there are fusions thereof. It's the same with Jazz: you have swing, bebop, avant garde, free jazz, acid jazz (ATCQ's music actually fits here), fusion, cool jazz, hot jazz, smooth jazz, etc. Many artists have music that fits into multiple genres and even subgenres as well. In fact I'd say most artists can be described with more than one label including 2pac.

No, it's just a false analogy, like most of the analogies he uses in his arguments.

Hip hop music is music. All music genres have subgenres. Hip hop music is no exception to this rule. It has well established subgenres that everyone who is educated on hip hop knows about and they are based on several criteria, one of which is lyrical content.

As for artists creating music that fits another subgenre, again, you have this false assumption that an artist is a certain type of artist and is stuck in a specific subgenre or even a specific genre. This is bullshit. Miles Davis dabbled in pretty much every single subgenre of Jazz and even some rock and hip hop music (check his last album before he died that he worked with Easy Mo Bee to make). Same can be said for hip hop artists. Guru has dabbled in Jazz music, Q-Tip in multiple genres, same with Mos Def and Common, etc. Also, artists like Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, for example, go from subgenre to subgenre (ie: alternative hip hop to acid rap) all the time with no problem. We only label an artist with a specific subgenre when a majority or large amount of their work is in a specific genre or subgenre.

And........ ?

Here's this assumption again. None of us are saying anything of the sort. What we're saying is that enough of 2pac's tracks are from the gangsta rap genre to call him a gangsta rap artist, among other things.

am I in the fucking twilight zone or something where we can reiterate the same point 3,000 times and still no one gets it?

In just the same sense, both "Bitches Brew" and "Naked Lunch" are jazz albums, but listen to them. They are completely different. "Bitches Brew" is rock/jazz fusion whereas "Naked Lunch" is free jazz. Yes, BOBS and Eazy Duz It are both hip hop, but BOBS, as an overall album, is conscious rap (though some tracks are more boom bap and a few are even soul, r&b, jazz, rock, etc.), while Eazy Duz It (I'm assuming as I've never listened to it) is a gangsta rap album.

Hey pot, the kettle called. Said he wants you to acknowledge that you're black too.

Oh Great ALCATRAZ, please bestow upon us your infinite wisdom!

We are not worthy to be in your presence!

Lol obviously you need to work on your reading comprehension and listening skills.

Mr. Angel/Messiah Alcatraz, claiming you don't cast judgment is like the Pope claiming he's an atheist.

I think it had something to do with the preserved 2pac cock sitting in Alcatraz's basement that he likes to consistently take out of the preservative alcohol and suck on.

Thank you. Some people have their heads shoved so far up their asses that they need to consult a proctologist to get a haircut.

He's probably talking about the freestyle diss off the Wake Up Show (SIIIiIIICK fucking diss btw!!!!!!!).

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

it trully is a rare shit, and Chino sounds very angry.

http://www.mediafire.com/?nmmgjwkzmzy

I read the entire thread, Watcher. Unless someone deleted a majority of your posts you didn't address a fucking thing I posted.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

You need to cool down man, I'm not attacking/trying to insult you as you seem to be doing but I did reply and I have no idea nor do I care to check whether my post is in here somewhere and I'm not going to discuss this no more.

Added (09/Feb/10, 12:28 Pm)
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haha i was just about to agree with eboyd here:

In pac's own words @ 2:25

in case the embed doesnt work
http://vodpod.com/watch....in-jail

Some call it emceeing, some call it rapping. Whether you want to give one or the other a certain connotation is your business. I believe the art of rhyming (rap) is definitely one of the four elements. That's my personal belief.