Death Will Fuel Rumors Of East-West Rap War

Sunday morning’s killing of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as the Notorious B.I.G., a k a Biggie Smalls, will no doubt be seen in hip-hop circles as the most recent chapter in the so-called East Coast-West Coast rivalry, though there is no evidence to support that suspicion.

The rivalry has included verbal sparring and several highly publicized incidents of violence. Most of the East Coast faction is affiliated with Bad Boy Entertainment in New York - the home of the Notorious B.I.G., Junior Mafia, Lil’ Kim and Faith Evans. Those on the West Coast have been affiliated with Death Row Records in Los Angeles - home of Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound, the late Tupac Shakur and, until his recent departure to form his own label, Dr. Dre.

With Wallace’s death, and the shooting death of Shakur six months ago, two pillars holding up this mesh of East-West conflict have fallen.

The deaths of two of its most talented artists have become a sad endgame for the genre dubbed by the media and music industry as “gangsta rap” - which at its best has been a poetic document of the economically tattered and violence-torn lives in the inner city and at its worst has glorified criminals, violence and drugs and debased women. Despite these ghetto roots, more gangsta albums have sold in suburban malls than in urban shopping districts, earning millions for the recording industry during this decade.