Tupac Shakur

Tupac was always celebrating his freedom and partying across LA and the US wherever his career took him. While on the set of Gridlock’d where he starred alongside Tim Roth on Vondies Curtis-Hall’s movie about heroin junkies trying to kick their habit while being caught in a social trap of bureaucracy. His personal bodyguard was a very professional body-builder, Frank Alexander. The pair were tight, homies as well as keeping to their professions respectively. He was hired by Knight’s Wrightway Security force and always assigned to looking after Tupac. He would score copious amounts of dope for the star and kept Tupac out of fights and made sure he was where he needed to be with appointments, acting as his driver as well. Alexander’s niece was disabled and confined to a wheelchair. She was awarded by a program that allowed her to have one dream come true for her. As she was a huge Janet Jackson fan she wished to meet her and spend a day with her. As Janet became increasingly busy and scheduled with appointments she was unable to fulfil her dream. Alexander vented his frustrations to Tupac who offered his condolences and suggested the girl spent time with him while he was on the set, filming Gridlock’d. Tupac and the girl spent the next three days together, dedicating his whole time to her, he behaved like a father-figure and showed her around his home and took her to the recording studio while he worked on tracks for his album. What the girl experienced was more than her dream coming true, she took a strong liking to Tupac and tore down her Janet posters at home, replacing them with Tupac’s imagery. Frank Alexander had never expected such attention and devotion as shown by Tupac and this is a side to Pac that is rarely shown in them media.

Tupac’s final movie was to be Gang Related starring alongside James Belushi as a crooked detective framing suspects in order to gain profits from drug dealing. In between this filming, Pac enjoyed his fast-paced lifestyle and red carpet treatment using LA and Vegas as playgrounds. He was slated to star in another John Singleton South Central LA movie, Baby Boy as Jodie, a local thug struggling to find work and balance personal issues with his babys’ mamas, starring alongside Omar Gooding and Snoop Dogg. Due to his death he was replaced with Tyrese Gibbons.

Bad Boy Killa

“I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker!”

Even before the release of Pac’s post-prison album, as a means of publicly embarrassing and striking at the personal life of Biggie, Tupac had been seen out at several LA parties with his new wife and Bad Boy singer, Faith Evans who knew her husband had been carrying on an affair with Junior Mafia's Lil’ Kim had called Tupac “mad cool” in one interview and agreed to perform with him on his upcoming album. However she was startled and embarrassed herself to find out the song she starred on came out called "Wonda Why They Call U Bitch" was dedicated to her and Pac stated in The Source magazine interview that he had been having sex with Faith. Further more on the unreleased b-side cult collector hit, "Hit ‘Em Up" the ultimate-throw-down defamation track to Bad Boy Entertainment, spat venom at Biggie with his lyrics about Faith, “I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker!” This was a direct strategic war manoeuvre as learnt from books read in prison, (Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ and Niccolò Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’) against his biggest enemy, Notorious BIG (or ‘Piggie’ as Tupac refers to him as.)

Soon after his first Death Row album dropped, Tupac confronted his east coast rivals Bad Boy’s Biggie and Puffy when they invaded LA for the ’96 Soul Train Awards. Backstage after their appearance, they faced off for the first time in almost two years. Suge stood beside Pac who answered threats from the Bad Boy camp who abused Pac from behind a wall of gun-heavy Crip security detail. Tupac, Suge and their Blood members were about to strike when one of the Crips drew a gun and the crowd dispersed. Several disparaging remarks were made through the medium of magazine interviews. One suggesting the two camps should box off in a charity event in Las Vegas. However, the coastal war grew monstrous when in April ’96 Suge declared his new venture of expanding Death Row Records to opening an east coast faction in Manhattan with Tupac promoting this move on an Oakland radio interview. New York industry took this as a distasteful insult. By this stage Tupac had publicly declared a war against east coast acts, releasing an infamous and very venomous b-side single "Hit ‘Em Up" which verbally fired shotgun slugs into the heads of any Bad Boy artist and associate, Chino XL, Wyclef Jean, Mobb Deep, Nas, Jay-Z, even on radio interviews Tupac violently antagonized the East/West feud warning parties of those against him of his deadly intentions.

The East/West war had reached a breaking level of devastation, the climax of every war indicated by death. This seemed evident to the entire hip-hop community when Death Row made their aggressive entrance in New York at the MTV Awards on September 7. It took 20 NYPD officers to separate and maintain safety between Death Row inmates and Bad Boy staff. Suge and Tupac spoke out on their Death Row East invasion. The animosity soared beyond control after this event between not only the coasts of the US hip-hop community but the major contributory parties, Bad Boy and Death Row Records.
This was the last public announcement to television Tupac would appear on.