TUPAC AND BIGGIE:
The homie love that dare not speak its name
Tweet
Tupac Shakur is just over the cusp into Gemini, at zero degrees, 31 minutes; he’s a very intense prototype of this astrological breed of twins, an extreme version of that quixotic, voluble, and inscrutable sign. Tupac had a tender, devoted side that he revealed in his love songs to his mother; yet his alter ego was a cruel, violent misogynist who raped and pillaged his way through the hiphop music scene of the late 90s.
Extremism is the key to Tupac’s aspects, which show Jupiter and Neptune opposing Saturn, an internal battle between his music—he was the poet of his generation—and his legal and ethical problems. Tupac was a rebel without a cause, subject to Neptunian addictions and wretched excess, and personally entangled in deception and megalomania. He had no friends, only sycophantic hangers-on.
With Mars trining his Mercury, Tupac’s mind produced profound and compelling lyrics, especially about the life and death issues of poverty and discrimination, accurately depicting the obstacles facing a young African American male in racist America. Yet his personal failings eclipsed his fame as an artist.
He was amazingly prolific; he made huge amounts of money, which he pissed away in an alcoholic haze. His lucrative association with producer “Suge” Knight of Death Row Records would eventually backfire on Tupac; Knight had him murdered in 1996 because Tupac owed him money.
Tupac had an electric effect on his fans; he had multiple, serial sexual affairs with women, but without any intimacy or pleasure; his Venus is in exact opposition to his South Moon’s node, a formula for sexual confusion and ambiguity. His main relationships were bromances with his homies. His partnership with fellow hiphop superstar Taurus Biggie Smalls, however, like many others, ended in hate and betrayal, one of many tenuous relationships that this hot-tempered Gemini extremist tossed away like garbage when it no longer was of any advantage to him. He eventually alienated most of his homies and sank deeper into a Neptune opposition Saturn state of chronic and angry alcoholism.
Violence seemed to follow Tupac wherever he went; his Sun square Pluto made everything a life-or-death struggle. He was brutally beaten by cops as a boy; in 1992 a child was killed by a stray bullet after one of his concerts; in 1993, an altercation in Atlanta resulted in a shooting; in 1994 Tupac and his entourage were accused of gang raping a young woman in a hotel, and in November of that year Tupac himself was shot five times by “unknown assailants” but managed to survive.
Tupac ridiculed and insulted his enemies in his music and in print. His claim of cuckolding Biggie instigated an acrimonious feud between the two men, which caused a rift between East Coast and West Coast rappers that, although increasing record sales, was used to explain the 1996 ambush drive-by in Las Vegas that ended Tupac’s life in a hail of bullets. Thousands of his fans turned out for his funeral.
Tupac and Biggie were themselves opposites within the trends of hiphop music. Lean and mean Tupac was like a deranged elf, a mad hatter with a blistering Gemini patter and a finger on the trigger. Biggie was a lumbering, slow-witted mannequin of the lure of easy money; his bodily lusts were on full display as he helplessly indulged his bloated body with too much of what his fans had too little of. He hated his own body, spent his life trying to transcend it musically via a Sun and Neptune opposition. For a double Taurus no self-hate is as tragic as body-hate. He was always on the defensive, his misery and simmering anger was palpable, almost hypnotic, he was a shaman of wounded sexuality and embittered by experiences.
The problem was, Biggie was living a lie, the Neptune covered his real life in a shroud of lies and exaggerations. Never a gangster, dope dealer or lothario, Biggie was always playing a bigger-than-life version of himself. For all his boasting about Gucci suits, he admitted, his suits had to be hand made locally because of his obesity.
The most destructive to his relationships was a suicidal Pluto square Venus, where every love affair, every business dealing, every friendship became a power struggle, an emotional quagmire from which there was no honorable escape. Biggie came off as sly, malicious, compulsive, insatiable, and definitely perverse; no wonder the closer you got to him the more you were repelled.
His relationship with Tupac went the same way; and Tupac humiliated Biggie at every turn. Revenge? Biggie Smalls was killed in LA a year after Tupac also at the direction of Suge Knight, taking advantage of his gangland connections and a corrupt LAPD.
Biggie had a Mars and Venus in loquacious Gemini; his lyrics were mellifluous, evocative. Biggie shared a Leo Moon with Tupac as well as the Saturn Neptune opposition; they both were imperious, vain, and felt that others victimized them. They put everything they had into success; in the end, though, fame destroyed them. They both died at the top.
In the music blitz of big business and big egos, sometimes even faux gangsters get caught up in the real violence of the genre.
All rights reserved, copy all u want ©2010 Siderealist.com