Reviewed the new Tupac for the Post today.
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”:
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.