GHETTO STAR - September 13, 1999
Shakur had just been released from jail three days earlier, after a year's sentence for a parole violation, his second such since the publication of what was supposed to be his transformational autobiography. He had fled after his first violation, and the police eventually found him on a neighborhood porch, receiving a long line of autograph seekers. The dictates of a celebrity culture demanded a manhood forged by being glamorous, not responsible.
As a young man, he had still hoped that he could demonstrate a workmanlike "usefulness" within his gang set. "You put in work and you feel needed in a gang. People would call on me because they needed me. You feel useful, and you're useful in your capacity as a man. You know, 'Don't send me no boys. Send me a man!' " But he was beginning to see his former life in a different light. What he once perceived as "work" now seemed more like PR. "What the work was," he said, "was anything you did in promotion for the gang." He found it amusing how the media viewed gangs as clannish and occult. "We're not a secret society. Our whole thing is writing on walls, tattoos on necks, maintaining visibility. Getting media coverage is the s--t! If the media knows about you, damn, that's the top. We don't recognize ourselves unless we're recognized on the news."
Kody Scott's image-enhancement strategies were not homegrown. "I got all these ideas from watching movies and watching television. I was really just out there acting from what I saw on TV." And he wasn't referring to "Superfly" or "Shaft." "Growing up, I didn't see one blaxploitation movie. Not one." His inspiration came from shows like "Mission: Impossible" and "Rat Patrol" and films like "The Godfather." "I would study the guys in those movies," he recalled, "how they moved, how they stood, the way they dressed, that whole winning way of dressing. Their tactics became my tactics. I went from watching 'Rat Patrol' to being in it." His prime model was Arthur Penn's 1967 movie "Bonnie and Clyde." "I watched how in 'Bonnie and Clyde' they'd walk in and say their whole names. They were getting their reps. I took that and applied it to my situation." Cinematic gangsterism was his objective, and it didn't seem like much of a reach. "It's like there's a thin line in this country now between criminality and celebrity. Someone has to be the star of the 'hood. Someone has to do the advertising for the 'hood. And it's like agencies that pick a good-looking guy model. So it became, 'Monster Kody! Let's push him out there!' " He grinned as he said this, an aw-shucks smile that was, doubtless, part of his "campaign."
Susan Faludi
Glamour in the 'Hood
In a South-Central gang, Kody Scott finally felt useful as a man. But the biggest part of the 'work' was promoting the gangster image.
"My father's generation was the last responsible generation," said Sanyika Shakur (now Kody Scott's legally adopted name) as he welcomed me in August 1997 to his girlfriend's two-bedroom house in California's San Fernando Valley. Four years had passed since the publication of Shakur's best-selling memoir, "Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member," written while he was serving a four-year sentence for robbery at Pelican Bay State Prison. The book's cover photo of the pumped-up, bare-chested author clutching a semiautomatic MAC-10, combined with the much-advertised news of his six-figure advance, turned the former member of the Eight-Tray Gangsters (a Crips set in South-Central L.A.) into what he rightly called a "ghetto star."