Shootin' Up the Charts

By Richard Lacayo

Can't find peace on the streets

Til the niggaz get a piece

F--- the police

Lines to live by from gangsta rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, 22, who not long ago gave an interview on MTV with what looked to be a pistol tucked into his waist. Last week Shakur was arrested in Atlanta and charged in the shooting of two off-duty police officers.

After a concert at Clark Atlanta University, cars carrying Shakur and his friends nearly struck Mark and Scott Whitwell, brothers and suburban police officers, who were walking in civilian clothes with Mark's wife. In the argument that followed, Shakur allegedly shot Mark in the back, his brother in the buttocks. Some witnesses say one of the Whitwells may have pulled a gun and fired first. Mark Whitwell's attorney says they were surrounded by Shakur and at least a dozen others, some of them armed and screaming threats.

Is life imitating rap? Faster than you could rhyme "niggaz" and "triggaz" (standard rap prosody) people were asking whether rappers -- especially those from the Thugs-'R'-Us subcategory called gangsta rap -- are too quick to use the guns they brag about in their songs. "Who is the man with the master plan?" asks a lyric by Snoop Doggy Dogg. "A nigga witta motherf-----' gun." Two weeks ago Snoop, 22, was charged as an accomplice to murder.

Last week, just a day after Shakur's arrest, Flavor Flav, 34, court jester of the otherwise unsmiling rap group Public Enemy, was arrested for attempted murder. On Tuesday morning Flav, whose real name is William Drayton, accused a neighbor, Thelouizs English, of fooling with his girlfriend. After Drayton pulled a gun, English fled to the lobby, where Drayton allegedly caught up with him, took a shot and missed. Released on $15,000 bail, Drayton, who once served 20 days in jail for punching his girlfriend, checked into the Betty Ford Center. His record company says he is seeking treatment for crack addiction.

Rappers aren't the first pop stars to cross from outlaw poses to real bloodletting. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols stabbed his girlfriend to death. Squeaky Claudine Longet, a vanilla songstress of the '60s and '70s, shot her boyfriend, a killing that she called accidental and a jury called criminally negligent homicide. But for the most part singers, even the ones who like to pal with mobsters, have been content to leave gunplay to the pros. Not gangsta rappers. In a world where it can seem as if everybody's "strapped" -- meaning armed -- the rapper Spice 1 bragged to TIME last week, "I'm gonna be strapped 24-7." (That's 24 hours a day, seven days a week.) "I've got an AK on the way, and that's real, you know? I've got a TEC-9. I got a little chrome .32 and a .380. I'm gonna get some more Glocks, I want some twin Glocks." Half a dozen armed friends keep Spice safe from "player-haters," who he says try to bring down successful rappers. "Six guns coming out is gonna get us out of there, wherever we are."

The gangsta style took off in Los Angeles in the late 1980s with albums from N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) and Ice-T. Pounded out in lyrics where testosterone always gets the last word, it updates the Three Penny Opera equation of gangsterism and rawboned free enterprise. The rhyming talk about Glocks and Uzis, the porn fantasies and rat-a-tat expletives -- all of it helps establish the rapper's ghetto credentials, excite the white teenage boys who are among rap's main consumers and provoke the mainstream press.

In interviews the rappers play hide-and-seek, sometimes claiming that the tough-guy poses are just the work of artists assuming a character, other times bragging that their bad-boy credentials are for real. Both things can be true. Caught up in the echo chamber of pop culture, rappers can hear their own songs egging them on to their old mayhem, even as their record sales lift them out of the ghetto.

After graduating from high school in Long Beach, California, Snoop Doggy Dogg -- real name Calvin Broadus -- spent three years in and out of prison on a drug charge and subsequent parole violations. "That was the key to my whole life," he once said. Snoop, now one of the most wanted new stars of gangsta rap, provided a good part of the lyrics and vocals on The Chronic, a 2 million-selling album by Dr. Dre, who pleaded no contest in June to battery for breaking a man's jaw.

The current charge against Snoop stems from an incident on Aug. 25. According to the Los Angeles Times, his friend Shawn Abrams allegedly argued with Philip Woldermariam, a probationer who Snoop's lawyer says had threatened the rapper with a gun on an earlier occasion. Police say Abrams, Snoop and his bodyguard McKinley Lee tracked Woldermariam down at a park in West Los Angeles, where Lee shot him. Lee says Woldermariam pointed his gun at a Jeep ; in which Snoop was at the wheel. Authorities say some witnesses claim Woldermariam was unarmed.

Tupac Shakur seems to be enjoying as much material success as Snoop. Besides racking up strong sales for his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., last summer he played a postal worker who romances Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice, the film by Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton. But judging from his background, Shakur might have been a shooter no matter what career he had pursued. In a sense he was doing time even before he was born. His mother Afeni is a former Black Panther, one of a group accused in the early 1970s of conspiring to plant bombs in New York. Though eventually acquitted, she spent part of her pregnancy in a jail cell awaiting trial. Shakur's father was shot to death not long after being released from prison. Shakur "would have been even quicker to use a gun if he didn't have an album," says Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam records.

Even before the Atlanta incident, Shakur faced criminal and civil suits from Menace II Society co-director Allen Hughes, who says that after he dumped Shakur from the cast, the rapper attacked him with a lead pipe. Last year he was denounced by Dan Quayle himself after a car thief who murdered a Texas state trooper claimed to have been inspired by Shakur's debut album, 2Pacalypse Now. Though the jury didn't buy that defense in the killer's trial, the trooper's widow brought a multimillion-dollar product-liability suit against Shakur. For his part, Shakur has a $10 million civil rights suit against the Oakland, California, police department, in which he claims that he was beaten by two officers who ticketed him for jaywalking.

A backlash against gangsta has been forming, especially among blacks who may be fans of other, less bloody-minded styles of hip-hop. "They send messages to children, and kids are impressionable" says Von Alexander of the National Political Congress of Black Women, which has launched a national petition drive to bring pressure on record companies. Rap Sheet magazine will no longer accept ads for albums that show rappers with guns.

KRS-One, a rapper who began to sour on the gangsta image when one of his associates was killed, says rap felons are proof that "you can't sweep society's problem children under the rug. When you look under that rug you're gonna get blasted in your face." But Eazy-E, a former member of N.W.A., thinks that, if nothing else, self-interest ought to persuade them to cool ! off. "A lot of rappers are trying to live a fantasy," he says. "They have careers, and something stupid could end everything that's goin' good for 'em."

It's too soon to tell how it will play for the trio of rappers booked in recent weeks. Though Snoop is free on $1 million bail, his problems have delayed release of his solo debut, Doggy Style, which is widely expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. It's expected now to be out later this month. How much longer Snoop will be out is another question.

With reporting by John Dickerson/New York, Joyce Leviton/Atlanta and Jeffery Ressner/Los Angeles