The Meteoric Rise And Fall Of Death Row Records

Publish date: 2024-05-15

On September 7, 1996, Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur were involved in an altercation with a Crips gang member after a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. Hours later, as they waited at a red light, their car was riddled with bullets, four of which struck Shakur in the chest and one of which grazed Knight, according to the Los Angeles Times. Shakur died days later in the hospital.

Just months later, on March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, per The New York Times. It has since been widely speculated that Wallace's murder was in retaliation for Tupac's, since — as outlined by documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield in an interview with the Independent — multiple lengthy investigations, both of the official and journalistic variety, indicated that the bad blood between the camps had finally boiled over. It was at this point that rap fans seemed to decide en masse that perhaps the East Coast-West Coast rivalry had ceased to be any kind of fun.

As for Knight, the fight during his fateful Vegas trip with Shakur constituted a violation of his probation, which stemmed from a 1992 assault conviction, per the Los Angeles Times. Just over a week before Wallace's murder, Knight was sentenced to nine years in prison, precipitating the swift decline of a label that had been ruling the rap world just a few years prior.

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