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Los Angeles music executives, while eulogizing Shakur, will not go near the circumstances of his death: it is as if Tin Pan Alley had taken a vow of omerta. The consensus in the New York rap community is that it was not an East-West affair. Knight has history and holdings in Las Vegas, and it is unlikely that putative East Coast assassins would attempt a hit on his turf, especially since Shakur had been rather publicly lodging in Manhattan's Essex House hotel the week before. Police opinion notwithstanding, some find meaning in the fact that the victim in the MGM videotape is rumored to belong to the Crips street gang, while Knight has been linked with the rival Bloods. Or some prior Knight enemy may have been involved. Or some prior Shakur enemy. Says Wendy Day, president of the Rap Coalition, who visited him in prison in 1995: "Tupac's image is that he has burned a lot of bridges. There were a lot of people gunning for him."
The usual conspirators: his enemies, his milieu, himself. Chuck D, formerly of the rap group Public Enemy, muses that a man he regarded as "a good brother" lost his balance between worlds: "Hip-hop moves fast, but the hood stands still." He also wonders about gangsta's perverse marketing dynamic: "Take the high road, and your record never sees the light of day. Take the low road, and you sell a million copies." Perhaps Shakur's awful end will change that by encouraging colleagues and fans to ponder the real truth of his remark to a music magazine regarding a friend's shooting: "Ain't no words. The rules of the game are so self-explanatory. What goes 'round comes 'round."
--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and David E. Thigpen/New York