artist types, and other oddballs—was just the right fit, a welcome reprieve from schools where he’d been ridiculed for his odd name and ill-fitting clothes. Soon, Tupac and Dana’s crew—they’d called themselves the East Side Crew—had merged with Darrin’s and Gerard’s. “We started hanging, and then, one day after school, I invited ’Pac and Darrin to come to my house,” he remembers.“I was making beats, and I wanted them to hear some. Basically, once I played a beat, ’Pac started spitting rhymes for like fifteen minutes . He was rapping on and on and on and on . I’m like,‘Oh shit!’ I wasn’t even recording it at first. And I went and tried to record it, and he starts talking about one of his girls that goes to the school with us that he was dating, just freestyling. It was crazy, it was dope. After that point,
the walls in that hallway, and made it sound better. We all go to this battle downstairs, and it’s Tupac and this guy that we don’t know, who I found out later is Dana. And Tupac and Dana just murdered everybody. So this whole battle thing is how I really got introduced to Tupac....I’m like,‘That’s that kid that was rapping at my brother’s school.’” Then a sophomore,Tupac had just transferred into BSA, an all- city public performing arts school in the mold of NewYork’s High School of Performing Arts (later known as Fiorello H. LaGuardia, and the inspiration for the film and TV show, Fame) . He shined as a member of the theater department, where his cohorts included Gerard and Darrin’s friend, Jada Pinkett. For Tupac, the school— with its open-minded student body of theater kids, sensitive
( above ) Lyrics to “Who the Hell R U,” an unrecorded Born Busy track, handwritten on legal-pad paper by Tupac Shakur in 1988, from GE-OLOGY’s personal archives. While the lyrics are fairly light, the song’s closing line speaks to the intensity that ’Pac would bring to his music and career: I’ll fight 2 the death 4 something that’s mine . “Reading these lyrics brings it all back to me,” GE-OLOGY says. “It feels like yesterday. We had a lot of good times.”
114 WaxPoetics
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting