East Coast/West Coast War: Over???

East Coast / West Coast War?

On the surface, the war between East and West Coast rappers seemed to be cooling.

A February truce meeting called on TV's The Steve Harvey Show brought together New York record mogul Sean "Puffy" Combs and L.A. rap icon Snoop Doggy Dogg to call for an end to the bitterness and hatred between the coasts.

Sunday, on radio airwaves, among record execs and fans, speculation was that not everyone was paying attention.

New York rapper Christopher Wallace - whose stage name was the Notorious B.I.G. and nickname was Biggie Smalls - died in a drive-by shooting at age 24 early Sunday after he and his entourage exited a Vibe magazine party here. His death came almost six months to the day after West Coast rap star Tupac Shakur was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip at age 25. That killing still is unsolved.

The motive in each case is unclear; Sunday, a Los Angeles police spokesman said there were few leads and no suspects in Wallace's death.

Rap observers wondered whether the killing was retaliatory - another salvo in a feud between East and West Coast rappers. Wallace, a self-admitted former crack dealer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, was considered a Shakur rival.

Shakur had accused him of involvement in a 1994 robbery in which Shakur was shot and lost $40,000 in jewelry. Wallace was angered at Shakur's claim that he had slept with the woman in Wallace's life, singer Faith Evans.

"I thought Tupac was going to be the end of it. But the psychodrama keeps going," a distraught Quincy Jones told USA TODAY Sunday from his Bel-Air, Calif., home. His Vibe magazine, which chronicles hip-hop music, stars and issues, staged Saturday's party for 1,500 guests, but Jones did not attend.

In the rap world, where stars boast of living the thug life, the killing is "life imitating art," Jones says. "I don't know what this was about. I thought the East-West stuff was all settled."

Meshack Blaq, editor and publisher of the Los Angeles based Kronick, the Underground Chronicle, which covers the rap scene, was one of the last people to see Wallace alive. Blaq walked out of the event with him at approximately 12:45 a.m. Sunday. They walked to two green Suburbans. Wallace's record-label chief, Combs, got in the first one, Blaq says, and "drove away with his people. There were maybe half a dozen bodyguards with him.

"Biggie, Little Caesar (a rapper protege of Wallace's) and another bodyguard got into the second car." After Combs drove off, Wallace got out of his vehicle and started blaring his new album on a cassette player and asked Blaq to join him in smoking some marijuana and listening to the music, Blaq says. Blaq declined, but said that he would try to catch up with Wallace later at his hotel.

He says the three drove out of the Petersen Automotive Museum lot on Wilshire Boulevard, made a right turn and was about to head north toward the Hollywood Hills.

Blaq says a friend who witnessed the shooting said that while Wallace's vehicle was stuck at a light, a car drove up on the passenger side and opened fire. Wallace was in the front passenger seat. "They riddled the passenger side with bullets," Blaq says. Friends took Wallace to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but "by the time he arrived, he was already dead," Blaq says.

The 300-pound Wallace became an overnight star when his first album, Ready to Die, sold more than 1 million copies. His second album is due March 25. If the title stands, it will be a chilling legacy: Life After Death ... Til Death Do Us Part.

Russell Simmons, co-producer of the recent Shakur film Gridock'd and a pioneer in rap music with his Def Jam Records, spent time with Wallace at the party, and says the rapper was upbeat. He laments that the Biggie Smalls he will remember is not the one that the news accounts are portraying. "Every time I turned on the TV, there was a shot of him in handcuffs. He was not shown with his family or creating his art."

Although Wallace's death was shocking, to say it was unexpected isn't accurate. He had been one of the instigators of the rapper feud.

The beef between the rival coasts centered largely around who created the hard-core style of rap music known as gangsta rap, a genre whose graphic language and vivid descriptions of violence have made it one of the best-selling vehicles in recorded music. Such West Coast artists as Shakur, Dr. Dre (Andre Young), and Snoop Doggy Dogg (Calvin Broadus) and East Coast counterparts B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep and others have sold millions of albums.

The gangsta persona extended to record executives as well. Death Row Records, home to Snoop and Shakur, was led by 31-year old, 300-pound Marion "Suge" Knight, who built an intimidating reputation among colleagues based on his alleged ties to the Bloods street gang and a barely controlled violence.

Knight, who was in the car with Shakur when he was shot, has been accused of using baseball bats to settle business disputes. He's serving a nine-year prison term for violating probation on prior assault charges.

Combs, head of New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment, was the promoter of a Harlem concert where seven people were crushed to death, and left Uptown Records, a label he had largely built with his street-smart instincts, because his style clashed with that of more conservative record executives.

This summer, the war of words between Death Row and Bad Boy reached a boiling point when Shakur claimed on an album that he had sexual relations with Evans, who was then pregnant with Wallace's child. After Shakur was shot, industry observers and fans wondered whether an all-out war was imminent.

But record executives and radio stations called for calm, and many thought that the gangsta style was on the way out in favor of a new, positive attitude. A truce meeting in New York called by the Nation of Islam last September was attended by many rappers, but not Wallace, Combs or Knight.

At the time, Combs told USA TODAY he had no beefs with Knight or Death Row. "I'm happy to be young and black and have a constant job. I appreciate that too much to let myself get pulled into the negativity. The only thing I've heard is the records that you've heard. I've never been approached on any other level besides that. So it was more hype than anything."

Some don't agree. "The thing with the East Coast and West Coast wasn't really buried, if you talked to the people who knew what was happening under the surface," says Dennis Hunt, who writes about rap for Vibe.

David Wollack, who has covered the hip-hop scene for Daily Variety and BAM magazine, admits, "I'm really freaked. We have this complete state of violence, and it's totally Tupac-related." Wollack predicts, "there will be some more of this."

East Coast rapper Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, told Los Angeles' KPWR radio Sunday, "We need to wake up, man. Yo, this has got to stop ... entertainers killing each other."

Hunt says Wallace's death will make gangsta rap even more appealing. "People might think this is one more nail in the coffin, but what it does for the kids involved in gangsta rap is it makes it even more attractive. It's the gangsta lifestyle."

Jones plans to devote "the rest of my life" toward curbing the self-destructive elements of hip-hop. It's not the fault of music, he stresses, but rather the glamorization of gang life, "which has become the romance of the '90s."

"I hope people do not use this to try to promote a civil war between the East Coast and the West Coast," says Phyllis Pollack, who heads Def Press, a Los Angeles publicity firm specializing in gangsta rap. But, she notes, "if what happened to Tupac didn't change things, nothing will."