-It was the sound no one was talking about.
-Hip-hop was all underground.
You had to know somebody who knows somebody to hear hip-hop.
-It didn't really have a lot of news coverage.
Radio stations were hesitant to play it.
-But that was about to change.
-MTV opened the doors a little bit.
-And then "Source" magazine pops up out of nowhere.
-Back in the day, if you wasn't in "The Source" Awards,
you was not hip-hop.
-The teenage white kids out in the suburbs
want to know what's going on.
-I said, "Wow, you know, hip-hop
is gonna be bigger than rock-and-roll
because it's unifying people of all races and backgrounds.
-But that power to unify...
-It's gonna cause people to get killed.
It doesn't belong out there. - Can also tear people apart.
-I'm your big brother. I will break your big ass down.
-Y'all don't love us!
-That was the match that lit the stick of dynamite.
-Rapper Tupac Shakur has passed away.
-Some spoke of an East Coast/ West Coast rap war.
-I just believe that there's more to the story
with Tupac and Biggie's death than meets the eye.
♪♪
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪♪
-September 7th, 1996.
Tupac Shakur, one of hip-hop's most iconic figures,
is gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip.
It's a cold, cold day in the rap, hip-hop music world.
-Tupac's murder and the subsequent murder
of his one-time friend, then rival Biggie Smalls
will mark a bloody intermission
in the story of hip-hop's rise in influence in the '90s.
-You had the two most powerful hip-hop artists that were,
you know, basically carrying hip-hop on their backs
disappear.
It really created a vacuum that led to a lot of changes
in the hip-hop culture and the hip-hop industry.
♪♪
-The music is born in the '70s at parties in New York.
-You know, hip-hop was an independent art form
for a long time, you know?
It had a kind of downtown scene in New York,
I'm Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor
of African and African-American studies at Duke University.
♪♪
You obviously weren't hearing it on white radio stations,
and Black radio stations were really hesitant at the time
to play rap music also. - So what's it gonna take?
-Their core audience was African-American
middle-class and working-class adults.
And what they heard when they heard hip-hop was noise.
-We've decided to mask or delete three words
that are heard in a lot of rap records,
and they are [bleep], [bleep], and [bleep].
-The major record stores... They wouldn't even carry rap.
You couldn't get it at Warehouse or Tower Records
because they refused to carry it.
They're not... You know, that's novelty stuff.
My name is Greg Mack, and I created 1580 KDAY,
best known as the first 24/7 rap radio station.
-Anybody older than 25 in those days
really looked down upon rap music
and thought it was, you know, trash
or didn't think it would last,
didn't take any talent to make rap music.
-But two rap fans in an unlikely place dedicate themselves
to bringing hip-hop music and culture to everyone.
-They started to do this magazine
out of a dorm room in Harvard, right?
And first, folks are like "Harvard?" Right?
And then you see, you know, Dave Mays and Jon Shecter
and it's like, "Who are these two white boys?"
My name is Dave Mays, and I am the creator
of "The Source" magazine and "The Source" Awards.
"The Source" I started between my sophomore and junior years
with another white Jewish kid from Philadelphia
named John Shecter.
-You know, you always have these white folks in the room
who are invested in the culture.
-I was born and raised in Washington, D.C.
I got exposed to Black people and Black music and culture
at a very early age
and... and took a real interest and... and liking in it.
There was absolutely no other reading material or information
for this music and culture that was growing and growing.
-So Dave and John decided to change that.
-It went from one sheet to six pages to 16 pages.
Very early on, somebody mentioned to me
that I should read this book about "Rolling Stone" magazine.
And so that became my inspiration.
I said, "Wow, you know,
I'm gonna build the "Rolling Stone"
of the hip-hop generation."
-And it's a "Rolling Stone" cover in 1986 featuring Run-DMC
that marks the moment when everything changes
in the music world.
That year, the trio releases
a version of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way."
♪♪
-And that opens up the portal, right?
You know, Run-DMC sells 10 million copies.
-Even the mighty MTV, bastion of rock and pop music,
takes notice and responds.
-I got a man here that is currently doing a national show
called "Yo! MTV Raps,"
one of the original people from hip-hop,
goes by the name of... - The big thing that happens
is when "Yo! MTV" gets created in 1988,
you know, first with a weekly show
and then a daily show... That was a game changer.
♪♪
- "Yo! MTV Raps" was very instrumental
for helping some of those underground artists
that were, like, really good
and doing these little baby shows...
They was getting air time.
Hey, I'm Bill Bellamy, and I was the veejay of "MTV Jams"
during the '90s.
What a blast.
[ Laughs ]
-Interviews with rappers and performances on air
gave America's youth of all races
an up-close look at this exploding scene.
-MTV opened the doors a little bit,
which was bananas for the artists.
All these different artists that was like right there,
now they are getting air time.
That changed the game for them.
So when the doors opened up, MTV was giving a bird's eye view
what hip-hop was to mainstream America.
"I said," Wow, you know, hip-hop
is gonna be bigger than rock-and-roll
because it's unifying people of all races and backgrounds
in a way that, you know,
no other music has really ever done."
- "The Source" starts writing about artists like Eazy-E,
whose rhymes describe a very different existence
from the one many of its white suburban readers are living.
Gangsta rap has arrived, and its brashest voice hails
from the streets of South Central L.A.
-NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" is the first rap LP
to get a parental advisory sticker,
and its controversial single, "the Police,"
draws the nation's attention.
♪♪
-When NWA came out with "F the Police,"
at first I was like, "Damn, everything that I've dealt with,
they're talking about.
Having a Hispanic wife at the time,
we were constantly getting pulled over
because they thought I was a pimp.
So, hell yeah, "F" the police, you know?
-But there are no music videos, there's no radio airplay.
And folks are trying to figure out,
"What is this thing now that's on the top of the charts?"
-Word on the street... When it comes to, you know,
rap music, it's all word of mouth.
-The mom and pop record stores were the place
where folks would go regularly to find out what was going on.
And then all of a sudden there's "The Source" sitting there.
There was absolutely no other information
anywhere about hip-hop.
- "The Source" became this important space early on
for folks to be able to find out
what was going on in the culture.
-NWA proves gangsta rap can cross over
to white teenagers who read "The Source."
"Straight Outta Compton" goes platinum.
-People say we got a lot of Black people buying our music.
No, you don't get to be number one and platinum and all that
with just Black people.
You got all races...
Mostly the teenage white kids out in the suburbs
because they want to know what's going on.
-Hip-hop was appealing to people of all races.
Whatever you were, if you were young,
you were falling in love with hip-hop.
It was a youth movement.
-But the story of police brutality being reported
by NWA and "...the Police"
is about to hit every news outlet in the world.
-So when Rodney King happens, it was just really organic
to be able to connect those kinds of dots.
-On March 3rd, 1991,
four members of the Los Angeles Police Department
beat an unarmed Black man pulled over for a traffic violation.
The beating is captured on tape.
-Do you have any idea at all how many times
you were hit by a club? - [ Exhales sharply ]
-What do you remember about that aspect of it?
-Several times. Several times.
And then stomped and kicked.
-And now police mistreatment of Black people
described by NWA's "the Police"
is being told by every news outlet in the world.
-It was one of the first times we saw police brutality
against Black people on video.
I'm Tanya Hart. I'm an entertainment journalist.
[ Siren wails ]
-The billowing smoke and flames could be seen for miles...
An unnerving scene for people driving by.
-And it rocked the world,
and it rocked L.A., and a riot broke out.
[ Sirens wail, police radio chatter ]
-And largely in part because of what happens in L.A.
with Rodney King, you know, hip-hop matured
from a kind of political force
that was on the fringes in the 1980s
into the best on-the-ground news reporting
of what was happening politically
at that point in time
-And for "The Source," this was a huge issue.
You know, we immediately put together
an incredible special edition of the magazine
that was in stark contrast to the kind of coverage
that you would see in any other kind of mainstream media outlet,
-These brothers and sisters who are rapping
and telling you stories... These... these aren't stories
as in fables.
These are real life. This is reality.
-As hip-hop's popularity grows,
so does the influence of "The Source."
The magazine launches its own awards show
where the line between the violence expressed in the music
and the violence playing out in real life will fade away.
-I'm in the front row.
This is my first "Source" Awards.
Sticky Fingaz pulls out a gun...
[ Gunshots, indistinct shouting ]
shoot the lights out at the top,
puts the gun back in...
♪ Slam, da-dun-dun, dun... ♪
I can't slam.
I can't slam 'cause that's real glass.
That means that was a real bullet
and he shot the glass out.
That's too real for me.
-In 1990, "The Source" sets up offices in New York
filling mailboxes and magazine stands across the country
with its glossy pages.
-I worked on weekends. I worked late nights.
I was, you know, often the first person in the office
and the last person to leave.
You know, it wasn't long
before folks like Chuck D from Public Enemy
dubbed "The Source" the Bible of hip-hop in the early 1990s.
-You know, I give Mays and Shecter a lot of credit.
You know, as... as the white publishers of a magazine,
they had to bring in Black journalists,
and they did that consistently.
-We began rating albums on a scale of one to five mikes,
and the five mikes being a hip-hop classic.
-If you didn't get three mikes and up,
you should... you should quit.
Those mikes, for whatever reason, back in the day...
You need four or five, real talk.
You wanted five, but if you got four mikes...
you're onto something, right?
-It's not 50 percent of the books, so...
-Matty C was the guy who basically ran
that Unsigned Hype column at "The Source."
He's the one that heard Biggie's demo tape
and featured him in the magazine.
-The notorious B.I.G.,
an up-and-coming rapper from Brooklyn,
gets the attention of "The Source" staff
with an impressive demo showing off his easy flow.
♪♪
-You start to look at all of the people whose careers
were basically created by "The Source."
Like having Puffy call me, and, you know,
when he's starting Bad Boy Records and say he needed,
you know, new artists... Did I have anybody for him?
And, you know, giving Biggie's demo tape to him.
-Sean "Puffy" Combs scouts new talent for Uptown Records
when he's not hosting some of New York's best hip-hop parties.
But in 1993, he starts his own label
with Biggie as one of his first artists.
-Check it out. This is my man, the Notorious B.I.G.
-What's the deal? What's going on?
-Puffy... he understood
how to package an artist to make them sell.
Hi. My name is Frankie Ross.
In the '90s, I was on the radio as an announcer,
but I was also a program director.
Puffy took Biggie and packaged him, and he molded him
and turned him into this notorious B.I.G. that we loved.
- "The Source" helps bring Biggie to the masses,
chronicling his rise from local rapper to hip-hop heavyweight.
When the notorious B.I.G. lands his first cover,
he's officially deemed the king of New York.
-In the early '90s, New York was literally considered
to be like the... the Mecca for hip-hop.
-But not to hip-hop artists out west like NWA,
looking to get their music heard.
-And so you got all these West Coast rappers
making music but wasn't getting no airplay.
-You know, at first, the rivalry honestly was really
just about who had the best beats and the best sound.
-I've heard different versions of how the rift got started.
I do know that New York didn't play West Coast artists.
[ Record scratches ] - When NWA's Dr. Dre
releases "The Chronic," his first solo record,
it tops the charts, helped by the video
for the single "Nuthin' But A G Thang."
♪♪
But even "The Source" is accused of having an East Coast bias
when it gives the album a less than perfect score.
- "The Chronic" got four and a half mikes.
So, I mean, we knew it was an amazing album.
We knew it was incredible and should have gotten five mikes.
-And when Dr. Dre's protege, Snoop Dogg,
releases the record "Doggystyle,"
along with the music video for "Who Am I? What's My Name?"...
it introduces gangsta funk... Hip-hop with a West Coast Twist.
"The Source" gives it high praise,
helping to legitimize this new sound.
-So when they broke through and artists started
coming up from the West Coast and they started saying,
"Yeah, yeah, we're here now. What?
The West Coast ride too."
So now it's like even money.
We're both selling records.
We're both putting out hits, right?
And Death Row Records was synonymous
with like the West Coast energy...
Where we at right now, gangsta rap.
And we're telling it like it is.
-Behind the G Funk movement is L.A.'s Death Row Records,
a label that Dr. Dre sets up with Marion Suge Knight.
-Suge Knight was definitely a big deal in the '90s.
He ruled the world of hip-hop, certainly on the West Coast.
-I'm gonna give the people what they want,
and what they want is the real stuff that they can feel.
-Suge was not a producer. He was not a writer.
He was a strong arm.
So he was handling business like a gangster for real.
"And if you're not playing my records,
we're gonna make you play them"... that kind of energy.
-Suge's tactics seemed to work.
With hip-hop blaring from car windows and boom boxes
from New York to L.A.,
"The Source" launches a grassroots marketing campaign
to bring the magazine and its music
to the country at large.
- "The Source" van was like the ice cream truck of hip-hop.
You know, we would basically send the van around the country
to every city, you know, large, medium sized cities,
go into the neighborhoods, pull up outside of record stores,
schools, parks, blasting music.
And it was like a mobile block party.
You know, we would pass out lots of promotional items,
you know, C.D.s or posters, stickers,
different things like that.
-And while "The Source" will help introduce hip-hop
to Middle America, one West Coast artist
will emerge as the voice of a generation.
-Tupac Shakur.
-I think of Tupac as, you know,
the most important and influential artist
in the history of hip-hop.
He was able to reach from the bottom of the streets
all the way up to the top of the suburbs,
and people followed him.
-Everything I ever sang, whether it's good or bad
is coming from my heart. - Yes.
-And if it's wrong, then, you know,
God ain't finished with me yet. Let him check me.
-He was very smart.
From the time he was 10 years old,
His mom made him read all of "The New York Times"
from cover to cover every single day.
-There was just something compelling
about his personality, right?
That... That thing that you can't teach,
that kind of "it" factor... Tupac had it.
Tupac, wordplay, passion, purpose,
militant, a little bit of crazy, but I liked it.
It all worked. His sauce was right.
-Yeah, I-I like to think I'm a rebel.
I'm revolutionary.
-Despite hailing from different coasts,
Biggie hooks up with L.A.-based Tupac,
who becomes both a friend and a mentor.
-I remember when we did Da Brat's video
"Give it to You," he was on set.
Him in B.I.G. at this time was friends.
I never seen nobody smoke as many blunts
in 25 minutes in my life, him and B.I.G together.
I'm sitting there probably high as...
and I don't smoke, but whatever.
-As his career soars, Biggie turns to Tupac for advice
in navigating the business.
-You know, he's a leader, you know,
somebody that people respected and... and listened to.
I had a vision which I think was similar to Tupac's
of how the bigger hip-hop could become,
you can make it big and successful,
but still keep it authentic and become a force
to revolutionize and change the world.
-And one of the most powerful players in the music industry,
mega producer Quincy Jones, seems to want to help
Mays realize his vision.
-We get called out to a meeting
at Quincy Jones' home in... in Beverly Hills.
We're you know, we're whisked from the airport in limousines
up into this mansion in... in the Hills.
And he says, you know, "Thank you guys for coming.
And, you know, really excited,
you know, but I want to let you know what I've decided.
-And then Mays lives a line from a Tupac song.
"Perhaps I was blind to the facts, stabbed in the back."
-In 1993, as Bill Clinton's inauguration is celebrated
with a pop-music-filled concert produced by Quincy Jones...
♪♪
America's youth is tuned in to a very different sound.
Hip-hop is growing fast,
and the 60-year-old Jones wants in on the action.
-Quincy is an amazing legend, but at that time,
what I gathered from listening to him
and other people working for him
was he really didn't understand hip-hop
and the true kind of DNA of hip-hop.
-Quincy reaches out to Dave Mays and his partners
to invest in "The Source" magazine.
But when they all meet, it turns out
he was not looking for a partner.
-And he says, "You know, I want to let you know
that what I've decided to do is start my own magazine,
but I'm prepared
to buy you guys out for $600,000
and give you guys all, you know, jobs working for me."
And I think some of... Some of my partners
were actually considering the offer.
I was really angry and upset,
but, you know, politely turned down the offer.
With the deep pockets of Time Warner backing him,
Quincy launches a competitor to "The Source,"
"Vibe" magazine.
[ Cheers and applause ]
The first issue features rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg on the cover.
-There were a lot of people that predicted at the time
this was gonna be the end of "The Source."
How is this, you know, little independent magazine
gonna be able to survive?
- "Vibe" was like one of the first commercial magazines,
you know, with advertising and just looked really slick
and really cool artwork. And of course,
"Source" was a little grittier and more street and more heart,
more edgy.
-Hip-hop and become big enough
that you could have both a "Source" and "Vibe" in the room
and not feel as though one or the other,
right, had to be the dominant portrait
of what's happening in hip-hop.
-While "The Source" and "Vibe" battle it out on newsstands.
East Coast and West Coast hip-hop artists also go to war.
The one-time friendship between Biggie and Tupac Shakur
is an early casualty when they turn against each other.
On November 30th, 1994, Tupac is shot while being robbed
in the lobby of New York's Quad Recording Studios.
[ Indistinct police radio chatter ]
He believes it's a set-up by East Coast rivals
and points to Biggie and Bad Boy Records' Sean Puffy Combs,
who are in the building at the time of his shooting,
as somehow being involved.
♪♪
-Just keep it tight, that's all.
-Mr. Shakur, how are you this morning?
-Biggie and Puffy deny any involvement,
but "Vibe" magazine adds fuel to the growing controversy.
They send journalist Kevin Powell to interview Tupac,
now in prison on sexual assault charges,
about the supposed ambush.
Powell would later tell "Vibe" that Tupac had no love
for his former friend. - I remember saying to Tupac,
"Why don't you all just come together and, you know,
Pac said something that made me so mad, man.
I'll never forget... he said, yellow M&Ms and green M&Ms
don't come together.
♪♪
-A few months later, Biggie releases a single
titled "Who Shot Ya?"
imagining himself in the role of the killer.
Though the track was recorded months
before the Quad Studio shooting
and doesn't reference Tupac, none of that seems to matter.
Tupac takes it as a direct attack.
-It was very serious. These guys were very serious.
Well, here's the thing.
When you are talking about the streets,
if you're living that hip-hop life,
you're... you're around people live in that world,
there's gonna be some things.
-With bicoastal tensions simmering,
"The Source" hopes to lower the temperature
by bringing the community together
in a celebration of the music.
The first televised "Source" Awards is held
at Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theater.
-'95 is the kind of most famous "Source" Awards.
Of course, everybody remembers those tense moments
where Suge Knight got on stage in front of, you know,
an audience of five thousand people in New York City
and basically took a shot at... at Bad Boy and at Puffy.
-Suge mocks Puffy for inserting himself into the songs
and videos of Bad Boy's artists.
-Any artist out there want to be an artist
and want to stay a star, don't want to...
Won't to have to worry about the executive producer
trying to be all in the videos, all on the records,
dancing, come to Death Row.
[ Audience boos ]
-It got like personal right there.
Diddy was synonymous with New York... like partying,
having a good time, putting my artists on,
being in the videos, you know, having fun.
West Coast is like, "Nah, we don't do all that.
We... We real out here, right?"
-Targeting Diddy in that moment, I would say,
arguably, has nothing to do with hip-hop, right,
and just has everything to do with these two personalities
clashing over who was gonna have a dominant cultural footprint.
-Dr. Dre!
-Tensions escalate when Snoop Dogg
calls out the East Coast audience
for not respecting the West.
-The East Coast ain't got no love for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
and Death Row.
Y'all don't love us.
-Lines got drawn, and sides kind of were taken,
and... and a rivalry developed between two camps,
two labels... the Bad Boy camp and the Death Row camp...
And then the rivalry between Suge and Puffy.
You know, it caused a lot of... a lot of tension
and a lot of uproar.
But there was no violence that night.
There wasn't even, you know, a punch thrown.
-That was the match that lit the stick of dynamite to me.
-What we saw was these wars... Literal wars,
shootouts between the East Coast and the West Coast.
-As rap music surges to the top of the charts,
politicians become its most outspoken critics.
-This is frankly offensive to me,
and I think to any parent, it is nothing but filth.
-It's negative. It's in the wrong direction.
It's gonna cause people to get killed.
It doesn't belong out there.
-It's a type of music that can pump somebody up
to the point where they have total hatred.
-And so you think about this
in terms of a political context, right?
This is the era
of Bill Clinton's infamous crime bill.
-Let us roll up our sleeves to roll back
this awful tide of violence and reduce crime in our country.
-Under the Clinton administration,
the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
results in longer and harsher prison sentences.
-And the crime bill was a response to perception
to rising crime rates
and this fear of Black youth that were out of control.
-I know when you're home and when you're not.
-Suddenly, you're seeing all these commercials
for home security systems. - 24 hours a day.
-At the same time
that white Americans are looking at these images,
they're watching television shows like "Cops,"
which double down on Black criminality,
you know, so Black men are seen as both prey and threat.
-Before blogs and social media,
print magazines dictate the story.
But while "The Source" preaches the positive messages in rap,
their competitor, Quincy Jones' "Vibe" magazine,
wallows in the East versus West clashes.
-The media fed into it a little bit.
You know what I mean? They leaned into it.
And so it fueled the flames.
So people were, you know, curating this narrative of,
"Is there a division? Who's better?
Is their hip-hop any less or more hip-hop,
the New York hip-hop?"
So that... was they created a movie in a movie.
And unfortunately, some of the artists got hurt by it,
people have lost their lives over it.
-The story's been told many times, you know,
about "Vibe" and the covers
and the stories they printed that people have felt,
you know, contributed to sensationalizing
and... and fueling that beef in a way.
Like it's February, '96 cover, Live from Death Row."
The way corporations, whether radio stations or magazines,
invested in... in the East Coast/West Coast battle
contributed to that moment, as did a celebrity culture.
-These kinds of problems are still something that's very much
in the sphere of the lives that...
that these rappers are... Are living.
-They were making these guys believe
that they were like serious gangsters.
They weren't really serious gangsters.
Not really.
♪♪
-Sensing things spinning out of control,
Quincy Jones holds the "Vibe" Summit in New York.
In attendance are Suge Knight and Dr. Dre, Puffy and Biggie.
In contrast to his magazine.
Jones preaches taking hip-hop in a more positive direction,
but the summit proves to be too little, too late.
♪♪
Tupac releases "Hit 'Em Up,"
a diss track aimed at Puffy's Bad Boy crew.
In the song, he claims to have slept
with Biggie's estranged wife, singer Faith Evans.
In another interview with "Vibe,"
Tupac continues to lash out at Biggie
when he talks about schooling his one-time protegé.
-I'm just mad at my little brother
when he don't respect me.
Now, when you don't respect me, I'm gonna spank your ass.
I don't give a... how rich you got on the block.
I'm your big brother. I will break your big ass down.
-I believe, in that last period of his life,
he made some very aggressive and... and violent music.
And again, that's a lot of what people,
unfortunately, remember him for.
But if you listen to a lot of his other music
and you listen to the powerful messages and ideas
that he conveyed for many years through his... his music
and his lyrics, he was a revolutionary.
-The East Coast/West Coast tensions boil over
at the '96 Soul Train Awards,
forcing host Don Cornelius to get involved.
-My assistant said, "Tupac and Biggie
are in the parking lot, and they're riding...
They're circling around each other brandishing guns."
And I went got Don Cornelius, said, "Don,
you better come out here and put this out,
'cause I don't know what these brothers are gonna do."
- "The Source" did a cover
during the middle of this with Suge Knight.
It ain't no East Coast/ West Coast thing.
I was very cognizant that a street kind of beef
was coming into the industry,
you know, with gang members and other people involved.
So we went out of our way to get Suge to talk and to say that
and to put that on the front cover of the magazine.
-I saw Tupac probably a month or two before he was killed,
and I say, "Hey, man, what's up?" Blah, blah, blah.
'Cause we knew each other, but he just had a look...
Everything that he had dealt with in life.
He just had that look.
It wasn't the same glowing eyes that I had seen.
♪♪
-On the night of September 7th, 1996,
after attending a boxing match at the MGM Grand
in Las Vegas, Tupac Shakur
is critically wounded in a drive-by shooting.
Six days later, he dies in the hospital.
-It hurt. Of course, it hurt.
Any time one of my kids...
'cause that's the way I look at them...
die for whatever reason, it hurts.
-I would have loved to see Tupac's evolution.
I mean, he... only 25, 26 years old.
I mean, what would he have been at 30?
He'd be 40-something now.
So, you know, I always got, like, love in there.
You know, I... just, ugh! It's tough.
-It was an awful feeling when I heard that he had passed,
You know, of course, immediately we had
to change the plans for the magazine
and put together, you know, a whole tribute package about him.
You know, you wanted to make sure that you did an amazing job
for him in, you know, commemorating who he was
and... and what his contributions were.
-In the months following Tupac's death, theories abound
on who pulled the trigger.
All eyes land on Bad Boy's East Coast crew,
but Tupac's murderer remains at large.
-I think it's really sad, too, that there is no one out there,
or the claim is, no one out there saw anything.
I think that somebody saw something, and they should
most definitely come forth and say something.
-For Biggie, it's a sign that it's time
to put the rap beefs behind him.
-So I'm gonna just be "forgive and forget."
-Right, right.
-But the realization comes too late.
-In case you haven't heard,
it's been all over the media, all over the news,
Tupac... rapper Tupac Shakur has passed away.
-Today, hundreds line the streets
outside a Nation of Islam school
to pay their respects to the slain rapper.
-I'm just here to show my respect for Tupac.
Brother was a good brother.
-His ways is really give us strength to keep on moving
and look forward to another day.
-It's still a lot of negativity out here.
And the violence is gonna take more
than just Tupac's death to stop.
-I still don't think people's gonna learn from it.
I still think a lot of stuff is gonna go on,
a lot of killing, a lot of violence still.
They're not gonna learn nothing.
-While the hip-hop world is still reeling
from the death of Tupac Shakur, another is soon to follow.
-The night Biggie was shot,
again, it was another Soul Train party.
I was excited because we were going to be at the same table
with Sean Combs, with P. Diddy.
But for some reason, my husband said that night,
"No, I don't think we should go."
Really strange... that night...
And he was insistent that we do not go.
[ Siren wailing ]
-Six months after Tupac's death,
24-year-old notorious B.I.G. is murdered
in a drive-by, gunned down
after a Soul Train party in Los Angeles.
-The rapper's car was riddled with bullets,
leaving him so badly wounded that he was pronounced dead
at the nearby Cedars Sinai Hospital.
-I don't know if people loved B.I.G. everywhere,
but New York took an "L" on that.
Like, B.I.G. meant so much to people,
you felt the pain of a funeral of like Mandela.
[ Cheers and applause ]
[ Horns honking ]
-To see people on the ground crying and stuff,
you're like, Damn!"
It was big to people.
-I would want him to be remembered
as one of the most talented and gifted artists of his time.
-To the hip-hop community, it was a big loss
because he was like one of the best artists
that, you know, ever rapped or was ever in hip-hop.
-He was a good man. He was a generous man.
-It's a sad day. It's a sad day.
-Another devastating loss, and the blame game continues.
-There are questions whether Biggie's murder
may have been retaliation for the drive-by slaying
of his archrival, California rapper Tupac Shakur.
-Some spoke of an East Coast/ West Coast rapper.
-So this is another... Another round fired
in this war of the rappers?
-Well, we... we hope that we're not getting to that situation.
This is a very tragic event,
and it has similarities to another shooting.
But there were a lot of people that were in the area,
and we're hopeful that someone will come forward
and give us information
so that we can close this case.
-It might not have to do with Death Row and Bad Boy,
but, you know, it got to do with East Coast/West Coast for sure.
For sure, yeah.
Hopefully, this isn't anything that has to do
with East Coast, West Coast.
-People looked at Biggie being shot as retaliation for Tupac.
So, again, everybody's guessing. I don't know.
-And then again, we look back at that.
They never found the person who killed him either.
What's that all about?
-We're here with him. You understand what I'm saying?
We're gonna carry on his legacy regardless.
You understand what I'm saying?
After the cameras and everything is gone,
we're carrying it on, 'cause we live this life after death.
We make that life after death happen.
-As fans mourn, they turn away from the headlines
and find another way to celebrate their heroes.
You could feel the impact
that it had on... On people here in... in L.A.
Murals started going up for Pac,
and you know, the brothers on the corner selling T-shirts.
-And immediately, right, you start to see
these ghetto art depictions of Biggie and... and Tupac.
And the way that we romanticize about them to death
has a lot to do with the role that they played
in the lives of young people at that time.
-This artist says his crew is trying
to convey a serious message.
-The message behind it is, "One coast, one culture.
Stop the violence."
-Two of hip-hop's biggest stars dead,
the music eclipsed by a sensational story.
In the aftermath of the two rappers' deaths,
hip-hop insiders point the finger at "Vibe" magazine
for fueling the ongoing war between Tupac and Biggie.
-That East West crap, "Vibe" has to take a lot of...
they should have got a bullet. - Wow.
-They should have got a bullet.
-In a tribute to Biggie, "The Source" asked the question
on everyone's mind...
How can hip-hop move past the violence?
-I don't understand this.
You know, I just don't understand it.
I mean, this is a beautiful guy
that got killed over nothing, really.
-I don't think either the death of Tupac or Biggie
was the result of street violence and street rivalries.
That's, again, another myth that I believe has been painted
for people to try to make people think
about rap music in a very negative way.
-Dave Mays has his own ideas about who was really behind
the killings of hip-hop's two biggest stars.
-In my opinion, there was other forces at play
that became evident, you know, over time, years later.
-As a founder of "The Source" magazine,
Dave Mays was an eyewitness to the rise of hip-hop
and the fall of two of its brightest lights.
He has his own theories on who killed Tupac and Biggie.
-You know, hip-hop was a very powerful force in mobilizing
and empowering, you know, the Black community
and... and unifying a lot of other people.
And, you know, I believe that, you know, very early on
it became a threat similar to the way Black Power movements
in the '60s were viewed by... By the government.
So I just believe there also was an element of government
and law enforcement, you know, infiltration and involvement -
The same thing we've all learned over the years
about what happened in the '60s with COINTELPRO.
- "The Source" still tracks what's happening
in the world of hip-hop, including the closing
of West Coast-based Death Row Records
after Suge Knight is sent to prison on assault charges.
The magazine also documented the many hits released
by East Coast-based Bad Boy Records...
including the song and video for "I'll Be Missing You,"
a tribute to Biggie.
And while Mays left "The Source" in 2006,
the magazine continues its mission
and remains the longest running voice in hip-hop journalism.
-I don't think hip-hop has ever died.
I mean, I think that's the beauty of it,
is that hip-hop will never die.
-Rap music is getting to a point
where everybody has beefs with each other,
and it's just getting to a point where it's getting out of hand.
-I think that hip-hop learned a valuable lesson after B.I.G.
and Tupac's death.
We're all doing the same thing,
trying to, you know, feed our families.
We're trying to make hit records.
We're trying to blow up.
-We never had a problem.
We're just speaking about it now because enough is enough.
-If the East/West thing would have kept going,
it would have just got worse and worse.
So I think that just said, "Wait, stop.
Reset. Woosah. Let's go forward."
-After Biggie and Pac died,
what did happen was you started seeing women get into hip-hop,
You'd see the Mary J Bliges,
and... and you'd see all the Lil' Kims,
and women were finally invited to the party.
And it was really time because, of course,
women always have a lot to say, and we're usually good at it.
-The beef that we saw with Tupac and Biggie
which was a centerpiece
of so much of the culture in the 1990s,
would be a passing Twitter beef today.
♪♪
-But many of the systemic issues
that '90s hip-hop gave voice to in its lyrics
continue to plague American society today.
-[Chanting] Black lives matter! Black lives matter!
-I was telling Ice Cube recently how proud I was of him,
you know, writing that song.
-If you really go back and listen
to the stuff he was writing back then,
and it's like, "Oh, wow, this is still going on."
There's nothing wrong with a party record here and there,
but hopefully somebody will get off of the bling
and talk about something that's going on in the world.
But it makes it interesting.
-Hip-hop can be that force that finally rids this country
and this world of... of racism and systemic racism
and... and unifies people, levels the playing field.
Hip-hop still has the power to do that.
[ Siren wails ]
-I think what the '90s did was bring the power
of television and social justice
in a way that was in your face and in your living room.
We can look back at that and learn many, many lessons
about where and how we should move forward.
I do have hope that somehow
we will be able to all get along,
just like Rodney King said.
We will get along.
♪♪