`REQUIEM RAP' CHRONICLES A GENERATION FOCUSED ON DEATH.

Byline: Michael Marriott The New York Times

Days after rapper Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds last month, a music video was released showing what seemed like a premonition of his death: a vision of his own murder and ascension to a juke-jointlike heaven, replete with a pearly white piano and Miles Davis as Gabriel.

The 25-year-old rapper in the video, however, was not so much creating something original as he was following other performers in an emerging subgenre of hip-hop music. Call it requiem rap.

The term is not likely to turn up as a label for a separate CD bin in record stores. But it may be an apt description of a growing number of rap and rap-inspired songs that have at their core the topic of violent and premature death and the grief that follows.

These days, even the most casual listeners of contemporary urban music have gotten an earful of these tearful tunes.

For instance, within minutes of Shakur's death on Sept. 13, six days after he was wounded in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, hip-hop songs about death thumped across the airwaves, like funeral rites with a beat, as urban radio stations nationwide crammed their play lists with the music.

Among the raps were some by Shakur himself, a self-styled gangster, or G, whose work is full of woeful odes to the premature deaths of America's young African-American men.

``How many brothers fell victims to streets?'' asks the refrain of Shakur's midtempo ``Life Goes On.'' ``There's a heaven for a G/Be a lie if I told you that I never thought of death.''

Similar sentiments are heard on ``I Ain't Mad at Cha,'' also taken from Shakur's quintuple-platinum CD ``All Eyez on Me,'' which was released early this year.

``The Resurrection,'' the latest CD by the Geto Boys, a Houston-based rap group, has lyrics that proclaim: ``And every morning I wake up I'm kinda glad to be alive/'Cause thousands of my homeboys died/And very few died of old age/In most cases the incident covered up the whole page.''

The CD booklet also features a photograph of the group's three members lying, eyes shut, in open coffins.

The most stunning and financially successful example of these hip-hop eulogy songs is this year's ``Tha Crossroads,'' by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the Cleveland-based rap and rhythm-and-blues group. This sensitive, sweetly expressed song about earthly loss and eternal judgment has sold 2 million copies.

It soared to No. 1 on the singles chart two weeks after it was released in April, the fastest climb since the Beatles' ``Can't Buy Me Love'' became No. 1 in 1964, according to the rap group's label, Relativity Records.

Others also have lent their voices to the genre. Snoop Doggy Dogg's ``Murder Was the Case'' depicts him at his deathbed, struggling with the forces of good and evil within him.

Lost Boyz's ``Renee'' recalls the pain of losing a girlfriend as a result of a random shooting. And the megahit ``One Sweet Day,'' by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, is a tribute to a lover who is ``shining down on me from heaven.''

``It's mourning music,'' said Charlotte Hunter, a former publicity agent for Public Enemy and L.L. Cool J. It was she, in fact, who coined the term requiem rap.

``The hip-hop generation, much like any other generation, has its sorrow,'' Hunter said. ``But for them, Mr. Death is always looming.''

Through much of the 1990s, inner-city teen-agers and young adults have been confronted with staggering death rates among their families, friends and neighbors, the causes ranging from infant mortality to AIDS to substance abuse to homicide.

As a result, some elementary-school-age children plan what they will wear to their funerals; their older siblings mark dead on memorial walls painted by graffiti artists and grow increasingly listless about their futures.

Out of this sense of oppressive mortality that many in the hip-hop generation say they face daily has come a soundtrack for their fatalism and their struggle to openly express their pain.

Rap has long used death, or at least the threat of it, as a source of narrative tension. But like the fictional deaths of nameless gangsters mowed down in movies, death in early hard-core rap lyrics was frequently devoid of an examination of its real-life consequences.

The breakthrough came three years ago with the release of ``Gangster Lean,'' a rap-style ballad - and the only hit - by the group D.R.S. The song was one of the first in the era of gangsta rap to shift its lyrical focus from the deadly spectacle of urban gunplay to its sorrowful aftermath.

``These kids are wrestling with forms of social evil that they see abundant in their own communities,'' said Michael Eric Dyson, who is the author of ``Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture'' and a Baptist minister.

Much like the biblical prophets of old, Dyson said, the voices of the hip-hop generation are searching for answers to the fundamental questions of life and death and redemption. In the process, he said, rap artists who insist upon lyrically spotlighting premature death are challenging the central illusion of popular culture: eternal youth.

``So much of pop culture is about delaying death's inevitability,'' he said. The hip-hop generation's aggressive examination of death, often turning to religious language and symbols, is, he added, ``becoming the rhetorical cord that binds generations divided by differences of belief and cultural expression.''

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Photo

Photo: Tupac Shakur

``Life Goes On''