Rumors Are Building That Tupac Shakur Is Alive And In Hiding

Tupac Amaru Shakur, the rapper America loved to hate, died last September after being gunned down gangsta-style in a hail of bullets.

Or so they say.

His killer remains at large, and so, say some of his most avowed fans, does he. Some say Shakur’s living large in Cuba, like Assata Shakur, an African-American revolutionary who shares his last name. Some claim he’s playing possum because he didn’t want to go back to jail; others insist that Shakur faked his death to fool his enemies in the infamous East Coast/West Coast duel.

“When he got shot, he probably got taken to a hospital,” says Joseph, a 10-year-old fifth-grader on Chicago’s South Side. “Then he probably isolated himself from the world so he wouldn’t get shot anymore.”

“When I heard about his murder, I believed he was dead,” says Lamont, a 13-year-old seventh-grader. “Then I saw his (latest) video, and I didn’t believe it.”

Indeed, Shakur has become the Elvis of the ‘90s, a mythical figure in the African-American folklore tradition of Brer Rabbit and High John the Conqueror, a man who his fans believe can cheat death again and again and again.

Everyone, it seems, from schoolchildren to Public Enemy’s Chuck D has suspicions: Why wasn’t there a funeral? Why was Shakur’s body cremated so quickly? Where are the witnesses? Kids, meanwhile, wonder how a dead man can appear in a movie, “Gridlock’d,” released last month; a posthumous CD under an alias, Makavelli, “the don killuminati: the 7day theory”; and countless music videos.

“I thought that he was invincible,” says Dream Hampton, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles-based magazine Rap Pages and a free-lance writer who wrote an essay about the Tupac Lives phenomenon for Vibe magazine.

“He’d walked away from taking five shots before, discharging himself from the hospital 48 hours after he was shot … which I guess is part of the mythmaking. Accepting his mortality has been kind of hard for folks.”

Shakur was big and bad, an angelic-looking felon who had dodged death in a 1994 ambush shooting. He went to jail on a sexual abuse conviction and came out richer, more popular - and more boastful - than ever.

According to William Cook, chairman of the English department at Dartmouth College, Shakur is the real-life embodiment of African-American folk heroes - mouthy, hyper-sexual “trickster” characters like Stagolee and Shine (who outswam sharks and survived the sinking of the Titanic) who defied white slavemasters, death and the devil. Often, their tales were told in call-and-response “toasts” that were the godfather of current-day rap.

No wonder that even in death, Shakur holds many in sway.

“The very things that the majority culture would find worthy of condemnation are what make Shakur heroic,” Cook says. “He violates the rules. People want to retain that resistance, that force that is found in the … trickster figure. You refuse to accept his being overcome in the same way that you refuse to accept that Elvis Presley turned into this greaseball el creepo. He becomes deified.”

Of course, Shakur isn’t the first born-again hero, white, black or beige. Elvis has been “sighted” flipping Whoppers at Burger King so often that he has become a national joke, while theories “proving” Kurt Cobain faked his suicide flourish on the Internet. Fans refused to believe it when Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub; several novels have been published about how the rocker lives on. No one wanted to believe the truth about Jimi Hendrix, either. We’ve also been in denial about James Dean, King Arthur, Rudolph Valentino, Frederick the Great, Bonnie Prince Charlie and John F. Kennedy.

These stories usually crop up two or three years after the person, usually a charismatic male, dies, says Greil Marcus, author of “Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of Cultural Obsession” (Doubleday). Then, “it becomes a cultural rumor. Someone has seen them around. But you always have to have one break in the chain. It’s always my best friend, not me, who saw him. It’s always one step away.”

According to Marcus, throughout history, there have always been myths about larger-than-life figures blowing raspberries at the Grim Reaper. Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god, was cut into tiny pieces and died - only to put himself back together again. When King Arthur died, people continued to spot him years later. And then there is Jesus Christ, the ultimate death-defying act.

While they’re usually nothing more than playful fantasies, such obsessions sometimes lead to macabre behavior. After Elvis died, there was a serious attempt to dig up his body, and Charlie Chaplin’s corpse was stolen and held for ransom.

According to “The Unofficial Tupac Shakur Homepage” (http:// www.cs.arizona.edu/people/ bastin/tupac/ tupac.html), a Bay Area psychic “channeled” Shakur’s spirit - on air - through a Bay Area deejay. When asked what happened the night of the murder, “Tupac” responded with a flurry of expletives.

Often, however, these tales reflect good old paranoia: When Hendrix, Morrison and Janis Joplin died in quick succession of each other, rumors percolated that their deaths were engineered by the government to destroy the youth movement, according to Marcus.

Last fall, in an online chat with the “Hip Hop Corner” on Prodigy, Chuck D explained why he thought there were “just too many unclear scenarios involved” with Shakur’s death. Later, the chat became immortalized among hip-hop cybergeeks who plastered “Chuck D’s 18 Compelling Reasons Why 2Pac Is Not Dead” over the Internet. (Chuck D did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Among his reasons: Shakur died on Friday the 13th; there was no autopsy; memorial services in two cities were canceled; Shakur is depicted as Jesus Christ on his latest CD, suggesting a planned “resurrection”; and he changed his moniker to Makavelli, after the Italian philosopher/war strategist Niccolo Machiavelli, who, Chuck D claims, faked his own death to thwart his enemies. (Actually, Machiavelli merely went into semiretirement following a political disgrace.)

To be sure, there’s money to be made hawking the is-he-or-isn’t-he? drama. Even in death, Shakur gets endless airplay on MTV and BET, a fact that just fuels the eerie prognostications.

In his video “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” released after his death, Shakur is gunned down and is depicted up in heaven, rapping next to Hendrix and Marvin Gaye.

Then there’s his latest film, “Gridlock’d,” where he and Tim Roth play jazz musicians trying to kick heroin; he also raps on the soundtrack.

According to Kwame Alexander, who edited the anthology “Tough Love: Cultural Criticism and Familial Observations on the Life and Death of Tupac Shakur”:

“Since his death, all his albums skyrocketed on the Billboard charts. You could say it’s a marketing strategy. If he’s looking down, I’m sure he’s relishing the rumors.”