I slept with Tupac. Not in the Biblical sense, although I have had some beautiful dreams of it, always with the bedsheets of silky cream satin and the mosquito netting hiding us from the gaze of the rest of the weird dream realm people that are always making inappropriate appearances during things like this, like your mother or your high school gym teacher. There were rumors, so many about his misogyny, even a rape charge, an arrest, bad things, but I don’t know the truth, and I cannot help it. He was fine. We slept side by side on a flight to NY from LA. We shared the middle seats of the First Class section. He had a blanket wrapped around him tightly, his feet tucked into the backs of his knees. He smiled at me a lot, said – “Oh – it’s you. Right. For real, that is a trip.” He had gotten halfway through Faye Resnick’s book and left it lying on top of his chest and the cover moved up and down slowly as I watched him sleeping. We lay next to each other, my face inches from his for many hours and he had no idea. He didn’t snore and his skin was perfect, so that scanning his features for so long produced no irritating faults, pore eruptions, those little things that make superstars less super and more like people. When he died, I couldn’t believe it, because he was such an icon. Even though early, tragic death is supposed to happen to icons, it still feels like it is impossible when it does.
I knew little about the beef between him and Biggie. I had less experience with Biggie than with Tupac. I never shared a cabin in the sky with him and I am not from Brooklyn, but during his funeral, I was moved to manic tears watching the streets filled with grief stricken fans rocking the hearse, wailing the sorrow of their fallen son. Christopher may have been Notorious B.I.G. but he was just a boy from those streets and corners and he loved his mama. The documentary by Nick Broomfield, which chronicles the murders of both rap idols is favored heavily towards Biggie’s mama. They were close, as she had raised him herself, and so instilled in him values that made him incredibly genteel and honest. In the film, Biggie’s mama makes Christopher’s favorite dish, the one he would always ask for when he was still able to sit at her table and talk to her about everything he was experiencing in the whole new biosphere of the rap game, the new planet that he had landed on and was learning to walk with zero gravity. It’s a lovely stew, with beans and some rice, almost a gumbo, but thick as a jambalaya and as she serves it to the documentary crew, I wept with the darkest kind of regret and sadness, that the life of the Notorious B.I.G. was cut too short, and that his mother must carry on without him. Just some pictures, some gold records, but the real fire in her to make things right and find out who killed her son and to see justice done, which still is cold comfort considering what she has lost.
Tupac had a very different upbringing, but he and Biggie had established a close friendship that somehow soured, as quickly as they both rose to greatness within the hierarchy of hip-hop. ‘Pac was from the Black Panthers and his mother, a warrior high up in the ranks, taught him the art of war. Tupac Shakur was not a thug, he was a soldier, as was tearfully expressed by Treach of Naughty By Nature at ‘Pac’s funeral. Tupac was the expression of anger, rising up within the Black community, for lack of protection from the police, the incredible crime rate within his ‘hood, Black on Black violence. He would question the status quo with eloquence and wordsmithing that ‘genius’ doesn’t even come close to describing. He wanted to know why white America, which includes but is not exclusive to law enforcement, social services, all the government programs set up to help all Americans, didn’t come to the projects. He wanted to know why there was no protection from the thin blue line, which got thinner and thinner as it got closer to where he lived. He would loudly accuse the listener, and of course all those who were responsible for the conditions in the atrocity ridden inner city, “Who is there to protect me and my family? Do you think we are all rapists here? Do you think we are all murderers here? Do you think that we don’t need you to ‘protect and serve’ because we are cannibalizing ourselves anyway?” He dared to call out the police’s double standards when it came to what neighborhoods would be safe, and what they considered were beyond their help. Tupac Shakur was descended from Malcolm X in his rage at the system, his no holds barred attitude, pulling no punches and throwing down the gauntlet that had been prepared for him by his forbears Chuck D and KRS-1, and he paid with his life, or so I would think, just because that is what happens sometimes to the ones who tell the truth. Tupac was not only a prophet, he was a visionary. His legacy will live on despite the immersion of hip hop culture in conspicuous consumption and ignorance of the political views – not the fault of the rappers but the music industry. Biggie’s mama will find out who killed her baby. Hip hop will survive and thrive, and they will not have died in vain.