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THE LAST FRONTIER
The Clarion \ May 1, 2009
American Hero
For over a decade now, Tupac Shakur
has been hip-hop’s martyred poet, a brilliant
mind cut down senselessly at the peak of
his game. But all that may soon change.
Everybody has that one crazy friend that
believes Tupac didn't really go off to that
Thugz Mansion in the sky, but that Pac
and Elvis have been sipping Coronas (or
Hypnotiq, whatever) on some tropical island
for years, reaping the benefits of their
posthumous sales.
According to reports by the ever-trusty
TMZ and others this week, that crazy friend
may have been right. Apparently Pac showed
up in Miami last week, very much alive.
This really is a shame, because we at
The Clarion kind of enjoyed Pac being a
legend. Everybody knows that artists' listenability goes up by about 400 percent after they
decease. If Pac really is alive, his music will just return to its status as heavily sampled
pseudo-poetry riddled with cliched statements about race relations—ones that NWA
brought up way before he did. It won't be cool to like Pac any more; he'll just be another
mid-’90s rapper, like Snow or Biz Markie.
Luckily, the blog hiphopblips.com is reporting that the photo of Pac is really just a
lookalike, and thank God for that. For saving the image of hip-hop's fallen star, and for
keeping “Changes” cool for at least another 15 years, we salute that blog, a real American
Hero.
Summer Reading
10
ACROSS
3 Nabokov's underage
temptress
4 Algerian stranger
8 Dan Brown adaptation
flitting tlieaters tliis
summer
10 Albom's Tuesday
companion
12 Citadel foil; Great
Santini's real-life son
14 Tyler Durden's literary
creator; Survivor author
16 Litigious Mississippi
writer; started career
selling books out of back
of car
19 Elie Wiesel's holocaust
memoir
DOWN
1 Harper Lee's patriarch
Finch
2 Twain describes life on
this river
5 Thought good men were
hard to find
6 Sea-splitting Pentateuch
scribe
7 Footnote-heavy pop
culture philosopher Chuck
8 Melville's vengeful sea
captain
9 Swift's satire protagonist;
visited Lilliputians
amongst others
11 Salinger's angsty Holden
13 Used Napoleon and
Snowball to bash
communism
15 McSweeney's founder;
Figured out what the what
is
17 Lewis' resurrected Lion
18 Took the road less
traveled by