Shootin' Up the Charts

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The gangsta style took off in Los Angeles in the late 1980s with albums from N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) and Ice-T. Pounded out in lyrics where testosterone always gets the last word, it updates the Three Penny Opera equation of gangsterism and rawboned free enterprise. The rhyming talk about Glocks and Uzis, the porn fantasies and rat-a-tat expletives -- all of it helps establish the rapper's ghetto credentials, excite the white teenage boys who are among rap's main consumers and provoke the mainstream press.

In interviews the rappers play hide-and-seek, sometimes claiming that the tough-guy poses are just the work of artists assuming a character, other times bragging that their bad-boy credentials are for real. Both things can be true. Caught up in the echo chamber of pop culture, rappers can hear their own songs egging them on to their old mayhem, even as their record sales lift them out of the ghetto.

After graduating from high school in Long Beach, California, Snoop Doggy Dogg -- real name Calvin Broadus -- spent three years in and out of prison on a drug charge and subsequent parole violations. "That was the key to my whole life," he once said. Snoop, now one of the most wanted new stars of gangsta rap, provided a good part of the lyrics and vocals on The Chronic, a 2 million-selling album by Dr. Dre, who pleaded no contest in June to battery for breaking a man's jaw.

The current charge against Snoop stems from an incident on Aug. 25. According to the Los Angeles Times, his friend Shawn Abrams allegedly argued with Philip Woldermariam, a probationer who Snoop's lawyer says had threatened the rapper with a gun on an earlier occasion. Police say Abrams, Snoop and his bodyguard McKinley Lee tracked Woldermariam down at a park in West Los Angeles, where Lee shot him. Lee says Woldermariam pointed his gun at a Jeep ; in which Snoop was at the wheel. Authorities say some witnesses claim Woldermariam was unarmed.

Tupac Shakur seems to be enjoying as much material success as Snoop. Besides racking up strong sales for his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., last summer he played a postal worker who romances Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice, the film by Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton. But judging from his background, Shakur might have been a shooter no matter what career he had pursued. In a sense he was doing time even before he was born. His mother Afeni is a former Black Panther, one of a group accused in the early 1970s of conspiring to plant bombs in New York. Though eventually acquitted, she spent part of her pregnancy in a jail cell awaiting trial. Shakur's father was shot to death not long after being released from prison. Shakur "would have been even quicker to use a gun if he didn't have an album," says Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam records.