What The F***

Americans in their early 30's are the first generation raised in the hip-hop era. For my cohorts in this generation, we understand that this saga comes complete with mystery, martyrs, and murder.

But on some other level, we all ignore the absolute absurdity of this founding myth. Put simply, What The F***. How did these two poets become so self-absorbed that they literally got each other murdered? It's ridiculous. Nothing more.

Did John Lennon fans murder Bob Dylan in 1966? No.

Did Al Pacino fans murder Robert Deniro in 1976? No.

Did Lionel Richie fans murder Michael Jackson in 1986? No.

But Biggie and Tupac, and the people who surrounded them, were so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, that they took the idea of art imitating life and raised it to the tenth degree.

The photograph above says alot about these men, boys really, who both died before their 26th birthdays. Look how young they look, but also look at how desperate they each are to appear hard, heartless, menacing. Each without a father, a lost boy playing tough.

What is the legacy of these men? The conventional wisdom among hip-hop fans is that Biggie and Tupac are the 2 greatest rappers of all time, or at least in the top 5.

Personally I feel that their rapping skills are almost beside the point. They were both great. And we'll never know how great they could have been. To put it in perspective, Lil' Wayne is older than either Biggie or Tupac ever lived to be. And Lil' Wayne is still Lil'.

But why did these men die? They fell victim in large part to their own words, in which they wrote and spoke about black-on-black murder as inevitable, necessary, and not necessarily negative.

But they also died because nobody went to bat for them.

Tupac was shot on the strip in Las Vegas, in front of Circus Circus after a Mike Tyson fight. This is the equivalent of being murdered in Times Square on New Year's Eve. But no witnesses came forward.

Hundreds of people must have seen the person who murdered Tupac Shakur, but his murder is unsolved.

Biggie was murdered 6 months later in Los Angeles, also on a public street in front of dozens of witnesses. His murder is also unsolved.

This is not a romantic founding myth. These murders were not random. They were not inevitable. They were the avoidable byproduct of the very messages that these men were famous for articulating.

Rap aficionados wonder what these men would have become. We'll never know. All we'll ever know is that these men were murdered, and the code they lived by guaranteed that nobody came forward to punish their killers.

What the F***.