Walking The Tight Rope Essay, Research Paper

Walking the tight rope

The recent murder of Tupac Shakur is a great tragedy and a waste of

a young, promising life. Shakur at only 25 years-old had come to

represent a volatile mixture of youthful energy, exuberance, arrogance,

self-confidence and, at times, foolishness. He represented possibility

on the one hand and self-destruction on the other. What mustn’t be

overlooked as the Hip-Hop Community mourns his loss is that there

are many young Black men like Tupac Shakur who although less

well-known and less financially secure, are equally caught up in

self-destructive lifestyles. Due to a great deal of misinformation and a

changing economy, their numbers are growing, even as they are being

wiped off the planet everyday. Herein lies one of the greatest

challenges facing the Black world in the 21st century: how do we

combat the dominant public image of young Black men that has

largely been produced by mass media? Tupac Shakur’s life and death

is a microcosm of the larger picture. Do we dare peer into it?

Rap music is no longer simply the local, communal form of

entertainment that it was at its inception in the early 1970s. And even

the thriving commercial entity it became by the late 1980s+as gangsta

rap moved from the margins of hip-hop culture to the center+has

already been transformed. Despite the various changes in the rap

industry over the last six years, there has been at least one constant:

rap artists who have enjoyed international fame and platinum sales due

to their ability to shock with Black pathological horror stories and

thereby entertain. Although some advance a musical art form whose

artistic, political and social implications have yet to be thoroughly

critiqued or completely understood, rap music’s firmly entrenched dual

role as a corporate business and cultural artform demands that artists

primarily project stereotypes of young Black men as reality. Within

the music industry the belief persists that images of Black men as

gun-toters, drug users, drug sellers, irresponsible fathers, and violent,

misogynists are not only authentic representations of Black men, but

Black men at their best. And although the rap artform grew out of

Black culture, hip-hop culture in the mid- 1990s more often mirror a

dog-eat-dog street culture that destroys more lives that it strengthens.

As a major rap artist who had an affinity for acting (see Bishop in

Juice and Birdie in Above the Rim), Tupac often walked the

tightrope between the art and the reality . . .

Bakari Kitwana is the Political Editor of The Source: The

Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture, and Politics, and the

Author of The Rap on Gangsta Rap. He is also a contributor to

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and lectures on

rap music and Black youth culture at colleges and universities

across the country.

TUPAC AND THE POLITICS OF “FUCK IT”

By Esther Iverem

Grab your Glocks (guns) when you see Tupac.

Call the cops when you see Tupac…

You shot me but ya punks didn’t finish.

Now you’re about to feel the wrath of a menace.

…You know who the REALNESS is

–Tupac Shakur From Hit “Em Up

If you spent any time at all around Tupac, you saw how easy it was

for him to let a raised middle finger lead him through the world.

Whether he was proclaiming to me in an interview that he stays

perpetually strapped and high on marijuana, or spiritedly waving a

bottle of malt liquor for the camera on the “California Love, Part II”

video, his most consistent image was that of a man doing as he

pleased, living life by his own rules. “Fuck it,” the rich young man

seemed to say. And if you didn’t like it, well then, “fuck you too.”

Most of us growing up black in America can identify in a particular

way with the quick, bottom-line toughness that sentiment implies. It

makes us feel so powerful in a society that has always raised its

middle finger to us. This feeling of strength — and don’t we need to

feel strong, with every in-your-face Shaquille O’Neal dunk — is one of

the reasons so many people identified with Tupac as a real brother.

But that affinity mixes what is potentially a positive attitude toward self

determination with the worst definitions of that over-used phrase:

Keep it Real. At its most meaningful, the phrase urges those in the hip

hop nation to remain true to beliefs and rooted in reality. At its worst,

it implies that only those things ghettocentric are true and real in black

culture. It endorses the use of street ethics to settle, like the willingness

to bust a cap in someone if necessary.

Tupac’s death is only the most recent and heart-wrenching reminder

that with those definitions of what is real, we are killing ourselves,

carting ourselves off to jail or retiring at a young age to wheelchairs.

Esther Iverem writes about arts and culture for the Washington

Post and has also written for Essence, New York Newsday and

The New York Times. A native of Philadelphia, she is a graduate

of the University of Southern California, where she studied

journalism and ethnic studies, and Columbia University, where

she received her master’s degree in journalism. She lives in

Washington, D.C. with her son Mazi.

TUPAC’S SQUANDERED GIFT

by Kenny Carroll

As rapper Tupac Shakur lay dying in a Las Vegas hospital room,

commentators, reporters and critics on the left and right were all easily

summing up his tragic life as a casualty of a gangsta rapper attempting

to live up to his wrong-headed raps. Their analysis lacked the style or

economy of my 14 year old son, who sadly proclaimed Tupac

“stupid.” My own reaction to his death was to think of the Washington

poet DJ Renegade’s melancholy libation for the victims of violent

crime: This is for the brothers who found out too late, that going

out like a soldier means . . . never coming back.

Shakur’s life and death are now in danger of becoming a cliched

object lesson on the dangers of drugs, guns and, unfortunately, hip

hop music. But Shakur’s dreary end holds another, perhaps more

profound, warning about the role of Black artists in an era of crack

cocaine. It says clearly that we cannot afford to be minstrels for

dollars or our own dreams of stardom. His death was the lamentable

loss of a gifted, misguided, young poet who spoke with insight and

energy to his hip-hop world, but who committed the unpardonable sin

of using his immense poetic talents to degrade and debase the very

people who needed his positive words–his fans . . .

Kenneth Carroll is Washington coordinator of the WritersCorps

program which conducts writing workshops in D.C.

neighborhoods. His book “So What! For the White Dude Who

Said This Ain’t Poetry” will be published in December.