Broken Record Presents: Slow Burn - Biggie and Tupac

00:00:15Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's just Richmond from Broken Record dropping in one more time during our winter break. Was something special for you? It's an episode from the new season of the podcast Slowburn, a great show from Slate. Slowburn looks at the biggest and most consequential stories from recent history, and this season they're looking at a pivotal moment in rap history, the murders of Tupac and Biggie. How did their friendship turn into a bicoastal beef that threatened to consume the world of hip hop? And how was it that two of the biggest rap stars were killed within months of each other? And why were their murders never solved. An episode You're about to Hear, host Joel Anderson traces the history of the hostilities between rap music and law enforcement and takes us back to the time when juries debated whether their hip hop lyrics could incite black people to shoot police officers. Check it out and subscribe to Slowburn wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be back with you guys soon with more Broken Record episodes in the meantime, and joy Slowburn. This podcast has language some people might find defensive. Ronald Ray Howard grew up in South Park, a tough neighborhood in Houston. He described it as a war zone like Tupac Shakur. He moved around a lot as a child. Howard attended nine different elementary schools and was held back three times. When he was sixteen, he dropped out of high school. Howard ended up selling drugs in the town of Port Lavaca, two hours down the Gulf Coast from Houston. That's where he was headed the night of April eleventh, nineteen ninety two, when a Texas Highway patrolman pulled him over. Howard wasn't a fan of law enforcement. This is Alan Tanner, a criminal defense lawyer. You know. Here was a young kid from Houston who had had problems with police in this neighborhood where a lot of the kids were brought up there to Hay cops. To begin with, Howard had another reason to be weary. He was a drug dealer driving a stolen car. The patrolman who pulled Howard over was Bill Davidson. He'd been on the force for about twenty years. He and his wife, Linda, had raised two children in the town of Edna, population fifty five hundred, where He was a city council member and the president of the Little League. As Davidson approached Ronald Ray Howard's car, Howard shot him in the neck with a nine millimeter pistol. Davidson died three days later. Howard was arrested not long after he fled the scene. He confessed to the crime soon after. In most cases, the murder of a highway patrolman would have remained a local tragedy, but the killing of Bill Davidson became a national story, one that would change the shape of the music industry. That's because of the cassette tape that was playing in Ronald Ray Howard's car, a dubbed copy of two Apocalypse. Now, how did gangster rap push America to confront police brutality? How was fear of gangster rappers used to prevent a reckoning with police violence? And would a jury believe that rap music could turn black listeners into cop killers? This is slow burn. I'm Joel Anderson. The cops in America actually killed kids. The rap music promotes violence against authority and consequently violence against law enforcement. The weight is LAPD was operating. They needed to get killed. I'm about to bust some shots off. I'm about to dust some cops off episode two Cops on My Tail. In the summer of nineteen eighty nine, a spokesman for the FBI sent a one page letter to the Los Angeles Office of Priority Records. The New York Times said the letter was historic until then, and the bureau had never taken an official position on a work of art. The work of art in question was the song Fuck the Police by the rap group NWA, short for Niggas with Attitudes. Milt all Rich, assistant director of the FBI's Office of Public Affairs, accused NWA and Priority Records of encouraging violence and disrespectful law enforcement. He noted that seventy eight officers had been killed in the line of duty in nineteen eighty eight, and he said, I believe my views reflect the opinion of the entire law enforcement community. No doubt Fuck the Police was provocative in their lyrics. The members of NWA fantasized about retaliation. White any motherfucking foo uniform just coming from the CPT police are fright on me, you nigga on the wall path And when I finished, it's gonna be a blood back. Dine into La Yo drag Us something to Say. NWA was a loose fraternity of rappers in DJ's from southern California. The group's leader was Easy and its stars were Doctor Dre and Ice Cube. Together they created raw and profane music from the things they saw in their neighborhood gangs, guns, and drugs. Fuck the Police was a response to decades of racist abuse, particularly the gang sweeps that had become common in southern California. Police said they were trying to stop the drug trade and gang violence, but many residents, especially the black and brown ones, called it racial profiling. When NWA's debut album, Straight Out of Compton came out in August nineteen eighty eight, it didn't get much radio play. MTV wouldn't air their video, Rolling Stone didn't publish a review. Most of the group's early buzz came from local shows, autograph sessions, and small black owned record stores, but not long after the album caught on with black hip hop fans, it crossed over to white audiences. A priority record salesman called Straight Out of Compton elicited forbidden Fruit for junior high. Obviously, somebody is listening. In just six weeks, straight out of Compton has gone gold, selling more than a half a million copies. Rebellious teenagers and hip hop heads weren't the only people paying attention. Local police departments facts the lyrics of Fuck the Police from city to city. Many officers refused to work security to NWA concerts, which made it difficult for promoters to book the group. At a concert in Detroit in nineteen eighty nine, the members of NWA were chased off stage by police after performing a few lines of the song. The controversy got NWA a lot of news coverage. Many in law enforce mcphear that nwas wrapped entices youngsters into crime by glamorizing street gangs and making bullies out to be the bad guys. Who was just letting everybody noted black people was fed up with getting harassed by the police and getting b bomped. All that attention, positive and negative, helped make NWA a national sensation. Doctor Dre thanked all Rich for writing the FBI letter. You made us a lot of money, he said. Over the next three years, few other rap artists succeeded in drawing attention to police brutality in such an intense way. Then in March nineteen ninety one, police abuse reached millions of American living rooms. The three police officers facing felony criminal charges who were among a group of fifteen who stopped a twenty five year old black man last Saturday night, then beat him, kicked him, and clubbed him, unaware that an amateur photographer was recording the incident on videotape. Los Angeles Police chief. The beating of Rodney King was recorded by an LA resident who sent the tape to a local TV station. It was one of the first widely seen videos of police brutality and with whatever it is we called viral in the nineteen nineties. Prior to his release from jail last night, twenty five year old Rodney King showed his injury to reporters, the bruises, broken legs, and the scars from the stun gun which folded him with fifty thousand bolt shocks. I could say, after the first three good licks with one you know, one with that with the shocker, and the next with the billy cloud across the face, I was scared. I was scared. For decades, members of minority communities had argued that police brutality was underreported. The Rodney King video was evidence that they were right. After the tape came out, rappers joined civil rights activists and leading a national conversation about police brutality. Their music also took on a new urgency. While America reckoned with the Rodney King video, Tupac was putting together his solo debut, Tupocalypse Now. Tupac rapped about police harassment and brutality throughout the album, and in nineteen ninety one interview with davyd, a Bay Area hip hop journalist, he explained this relentless focus on police violence. In some situations, I showed us having the power and the other situations, I show it as it's more to happen with the police or with the power structure having the ultimate power. But I showed both ways. I showed ways how it really happens, in ways that I wish it could be. The first single from Tupocalypse Now was called Trapped, and the lyrics Tupac fantasized about getting revenge on the officers who harassed him. They got me trapped comparely both the city streets by a coprapting to me, then asking my advinency, hands up, throw me up against the wall. Bitn't do a thing at all, telling you one day Second Shot couped up a few weeks after the song was released. The story from Trapped became very real for Tupac. On October seventeenth, nineteen ninety one, Tupac was crossing a street in downtown Oakland when two policemen stopped him. They accused him of jaywalking and asked to see his ID, and the police report officers refer to Tupac by's middle name Amaru and call him angry and hostile, they said. Tupac told them, this is just two white cops who want to stop a nigger. Good morning, I am here today with my client Tupac. I'm more shark here as well. And a press conference about a month later, Tupac told his side of the story. Next thing I know, my face was being buried into the concrete and I was laying face down in the gut up waking up from being unconscious and cuffs with blood on my face and I'm going to jail for resistant arrests. That's harassment to me that I had to be stopped in the middle of the street and checked like we in South Africa. And asked for my ID officer boy. Tupac suit the Oakland Police Department for ten million dollars alleging false arrested imprisonment. The case eventually settled for a reported forty two thousand. On the same day, Tupac folders complaining against Oakland Police. November twelfth, nineteen ninety one, Tupocalypse Now appeared in record stores. It was the first major rap release for Interscope Records, which was partly owned by Warner Music Group. Tupocalypse Now was no bestseller. It peaked at number sixty four on the Billboard Hot two hundred, But what it lacked in commercial success it made up foreign social resonance. Tupac rapped about the plagues of poverty and violence, and his righteous anger at the police carried echoes of his black panther lineage. Tupac told Billboard Magazine the album was like a battle cry. The police didn't pay much attention to Tuopocalypse Now. The record that set off the next battle between hip hop and the cops wasn't rap at all. It was a heavy metal album put out by Ice Tea. I was one of the first gangster rappers. His landmark song six in the Morning, named for the LAPD's early am battering ram raids helped to define the genre in the mid nineteen eighties. But I See was also a fan of thrash metal, and in nineteen ninety he formed a metal band with his high school friend Ernie c I sang and wrote the lyrics, which covered the same street level subjects he rapped about. They called the band body count Their first album, released in March nineteen ninety two, featured the songs Akk Bitch, Evil Dick, and Mama's Got a Doe Tonite. But the one that caused all the fuss was the last song on the album, cop Killer, mentioned Rodney King by name and also named checked. LAPD chief Darryl Gates Icy called it a protest song. Body Counts album, released by Warner Brothers Records, didn't top the charts. Here's Dan Charnis, who wrote about rap for The Source and signed hip hop acts for record labels. What happens is this album comes out and it's really not that successful commercially. It's a media event, you know, in terms of oh, iced T's doing a heavy metal thing, and that's cool, but it's not really getting air. Late then the verdict came in a month after the release of body count. The LAPD officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted of almost all charges. The jury's decision ignited one of the biggest race riots in American history. Since darkness fell last night, the city of Angels has been a perfect vision of hell. The number swell. They suddenly about half America just got more mal attentt and started things nearby. Dozens of thieves strip an auto park store. Some sick Christmas has exposed the worst in all of them. And Los Angeles is ignited by the fires of riots, sparking a war of words over justice in America, as I feel that the jury in Semi Valley gave the okay to continue to abuse and oppressed and suppress black people in this country. In the midst of the riots, news media turned to Iced Tea to explain what was happening in Los Angeles. Well, young rap musicians have some ideas of their own about what caused the dead knee violence. We definitely knew there was a lot of tension down here, and we tried to explain it to people, but nobody wanted to listen. We would like the voices from Danny in the hood yelling out to people on a rap record. During one interview, a TV news anchor in La asked iced Tea to do something to stop the riots, but he refused to play that role. I can't honestly say that if I didn't have this money in my pocket and I wasn't who I was, that I wouldn't be there too, iced Tea said. When the fires died down, sixty three people were dead and nearly twenty four hundred were injured. Police had made twelve thousand arrest. Estimates of the damage drain as high as a billion dollars, and thanks to cop Killer, I see was one of the public faces of the violence and destruction, and the weeks after the riots, a Dallas police officer came across the Body Count album. One of his teenage daughter's friends had brought it over. The officer got the lyrics from cop Killer printed in his police unions newsletter, next to a call for a boycott of Time Warner products. If we want this pulled from the record stores, it read, We're going to have to make it happen ourselves soon. The campaign expanded to police unions nationwide here's Dan Charnis. This jeopardizes all of Time Warner's upcoming business in getting cable franchises all over the country. And then nationwide police unions begin to join with Texas because all of them are sort of like on the defense after the La riots and the Rodney King thing, So they're basically trying to paint themselves as the victims. See. You know, people don't have backed for police, but it's the same thing as saying blue lives matter today. The protests from law enforcement got the attention of elected officials, including those on Time Warner's home turf. The La City Council and County Board adopted motions condemning Iced Tea and the label. California Attorney General Dan Lungren sent letters to record stores urging them to stop selling the record. The National Rifle Association promised to give legal assistance to the family of any police officers shot or killed if it could be shown that the violence was incited by cop Killer. Sixty members of Congress signed a letter to Time Warner calling cop Killer vile and despicable, and then Vice President Dan Quell got involved. Take for example, the work of the rapper Iced Tea Quell was speaking at a convention of police officers who were involved in an anti drug program. I am sure you're all familiar by now with Iced Tea's record, distributed by Time Warner, which says that it's okay to kill cops. Time Warner's defense is that this is free speech and it is constitutional. Well, of course, we all believe in free speech, and it may be constitutional, but that doesn't make it right. It is wrong for Time Warner Corporation to do what it's doing. These were calls for censorship of a single record from local, state, and federal officials their implication that rap music might cause listeners to murder police officers. Iced Tea and his defenders tried to keep the focus on the reality of police abuse rather than hypothetical violence against cops. Here he is being interviewed on Australian TV in nineteen ninety two. American people are really in arms about this song, which doesn't kill It's just a song, but the cops are in America actually kill kids. This is a very angry song, song about rage. Okay, but I understand that you said this in one of your US interviews. I've got no trouble with killing brutal cops. True, they have no trouble with killing what they consider brutal kids. See. My attitude is that just by because you have a badge doesn't give you the right to murder me. For a while time, Warner defended the rapper and the song, and in June nineteen ninety two op ed in The Wall Street Journal. CEO Gerald Levine called cop Killer a shout of pain and protest, and asked why critics couldn't hear what rappers trying to tell us. Everything changed after the company's annual shareholders meeting. That meeting was held in July at a hotel in Beverly Hills. Outside, shareholders were met by nearly one hundred police officers with picket signs. I see cruised by in a Rose Royce and gave the protesting cops of the finger. Inside the hotel, boycott supporters brought into the big guns. The actor Charlton Heston, who had become a right wing activist and prominent member of the nr A, was there to speak. Here's Heston recounting his performance years later. I asked for the floor and do a hushed room with a thousand average American stockholders. I simply read the full lyrics of cop Killer, every vicious, vulgar, dirty word there were selling. I got my twelve gage sawed off, I got my head lights turned off. I'm about to bust some shots off. I'm about to dust some cops off. Following heston Time, Warner board members heard from two officers who'd been shot in the face and disfigured. After the meeting, the Burbank headquarters of Warner Brothers Records was undersea. Each executives were bombarded with hate mail and received threatening phone calls. Bomb threats forced police to clear the building. Eventually, Iced T caved. In his memoir, he wrote the Time Warner never pressured him to make a decision. He said he felt awful for the corporation, and he realized the controversy wasn't going away. I'd been dissing rappers for years. They didn't do shit, he wrote. Then I'd dissed the cops and they came after me like no gang I've ever encountered. Iced decided to rerelease the album without cop Killer, and police groups called off the boycott. In January of nineteen ninety three, Warner Brothers let iced out of his contract he signed with Priority Records, which had distributed nwas straight out of Compton. The upshot for music artists and hip hop of Cop Killer is that Warner Brothers is going to start to tamp down all kinds of things that can cause problems in the future. We're going to have to look at every lyric that you guys are doing, and if you don't like it, then we'll let you go. You don't have to be with us, but we have too many irons and too many fires, corporately speaking, to risk everything because somebody's gonna get upset at your lyrics. Throughout the battle over Cop Killer, no one could point to a single incident in which rappers had directly incited violent behavior. That changed when Ronald Ray Howard killed Texas State Trooper Bill Davidson. Here's Howard's defense attorney, Alan Tanner. The prosecutor in the case, his name was Bobby Bell, called me one day when I was in Houston and said, we found some recordings that were in the vehicle that Ronald Howard was in, and I think you'd be really interested in hearing them, And so I said okay, and he said drive them down here Jackson County, and we're listening to him. So Tanner heard the tape, including the song Soldier's Story. That song describes a traffic stop that ends with a gunshot playoffs. So I failed till my dodge him, band left, and I blast on the funk games. Now I got a murder case. It's Tanner listened. He realized he could argue the Tupac's words had gotten inside of Ronald Ray Howard's head. I didn't know what gangster rote music was at the time, but you know, here was a young kid from Houston who had had problems with police in his neighborhood, and I was kind of fascinated by this music that he was listening to. And that's where I got the idea to, you know, use that as a potential defense as to why all of this happened. As soon as the press reported Ronald Ray Howard had been listening to Tupocalypse Now, Tupac replaced Ice Tea as America's most dangerous rapper. Dan Quayle jumped back into the fray, demanding that time Warner pulled Apocalypse Now from stores. Once again, we're faced with an irresponsible corporate act. There is absolutely no reason for a record like this to be published by a responsible corporation. T Apocalypse Now didn't end up getting pulled, but Tupac was now part of a national story. He was twenty one years old, he'd appeared in one movie and released one album. Now the Vice president was calling him a villain and a menace. Here's Andrea Dennis, the co author of Rap on Trial. I think Tupac helped solidify the perspective of police and law enforcement that gangster rap is violent. Gangster rappers are violent. There was no dispute about Ronalay Howard's guilt. Alan Tanner conceded that reality in his opening statement. There's no doubt about it. Ronald Howard is going to be convicted of capital murder, he told the jury, and he was right. On June eighth, nineteen ninety three, jurors found Howard guilty in less than an hour. The only part of the trial that was truly contested was the penalty phase. Would Howard get a life sentence a lethal injection. In a jailhouse interview, Howard said the Tupac song was so intoxicating that it had driven him to murder. He told a reporter. The music was up as loud as it could go, with gunshots and siren noises on it, and my heart was pounding hard. I was so hyped up. I just snapped Tenor asked the twelve members of the jury, only one of whom was black, to consider the possibility the Tupac had made his client snap. He then played a series of gangster rap songs for the The judge wore it plux. Why the music played. They all had a lyric book and they were able to follow through with the words as to each song. And we played like fifteen songs from Tupac and from the Ghetto Boys, and I think maybe Nwa and maybe a gangster nip, I remember. But the jurors heard all all the lyrics, and they heard, I mean, we blasted the courtroom. It was loud, they heard everything. Houston Chronicle reporter Roy Bragg remembers how stressful things were at the Austin Courthouse. You had this throbbing, massive anger in the crowd, these state troopers and mister Howard's family and you know, security everywhere, and it was just really intense the whole time. The tension grew as the jury continued to deliberate, and so at that point, when the jury's out now for more than one day, even beyond lunch, now it's an even bigger story, because now why is the jury out this long? The sense was, you know things are going, you know, we're hurling into the sun because we're not gonna execute this guy. The jury twice said they were hopelessly deadlocked. The judge sent them back in, and then they folded after like six days. I don't know why they folded. On the sixth day of deliberations July fourteenth, nineteen ninety three, the jurors sentence Ronald Ray Howard to death. He was executed twelve years later. Another lawyer tried to blame rap defense in nineteen ninety five, after two Milwaukee teenagers shot and killed a police officer. This time, the defense pointed to Tupac's guest verse on a song by South Central Cartel. The attorney for one of the boys said the Tupac's violet anti police lyrics appear to have acted as command hallucinations, which influenced his behavior. The strategy didn't work that time either. Both of the teenagers were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Back in Texas, Bill Davidson's widow blamed Tupac and his music for the trooper's death. Well, we've been through has been devastating to hear how my husband was killed, and I feel like company should be responsible for all out before the products that they produced and self. The day after Ronald Ray Howard was sentenced to die, Linda Sued Davidson moved forward with a lawsuit against Tupac, Time Warner, and Interscope Records. By the time Tupac was deposed in that lawsuit, he was doing time for sexually abusing Guyana Jackson, the case we talked about in our previous episode. In a meeting room in the Clinton Correctional Institution, Tupacs sparred with Linda Sue, Davidson's attorney about whether his songs encourage violence against police. Tupacs that the message in his music was clear, was that your intention to try to get young black people to be violent to police. No, were you trying to provoke anybody to do anything particular? Were you trying to jack Volk or trying to get people to do things? Yes, tell us what think he's your head? Next week on Slowburn, Who Shot You? Slowburn is a production of Slate Plus. Slates membership program. You can sign up for Slate Plus to hear a bonus episode of the show this week. In every week this season, and this week's bonus episode, you'll hear more about how rap lyrics have been used as criminal evidence in court. I talked with law professor Andrea Dennis about how cops and prosecutors have used Tupacs songs and other hip hop music to convict and incarcerat men of color. To hear it, sign up for Slate Plus at slate dot com Slash Slowburn. Slowburn is produced by me and Christopher Johnson, with editorial direction by Josh Levine and Gabriel Ross. Sophie Summergrat as our researcher, our mix engineers. Jared Paul don Will composed our theme song. The artwork for Slowburn is by Lisa Larson Walker Special thanks to Slave's Child, to Derek Johnson, Katie Rayford, Low and Low, Alison Benedict and Jared Holt. Thanks to Nine Australia and journalist David for some of the audio you heard of this episode. And by the way, we created a playlist on Spotify to go with this season. We'll be update to Get each week with new episodes and songs by Tupac, Biggie and their collaborators. Check it out every week at the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening, Peace,