Got Your Back: Life as Tupac's Bodyguard in the Hardcore World of Gangsta Rap Book

There's Tupac's name, and Tupac's toned, heavily tattooed torso on the cover--but if Got Your Back purports, by its design, to shed light on the last days of Shakur, it's important to point out that this ain't no biography of the late, great West Coast rapper. No, this is the autobiography of Shakur's friend and self-proclaimed "big-ass nigga" personal bodyguard, Frank Alexander, and as such, is more a series of observations from Death Row Records' hired set of knuckles than the illuminating profile that Tupac Shakur--and indeed, the convoluted, conniving world of Gangsta Rap--really deserves. Got Your Back, though, is nonetheless an impressive testimony from the inside of America's baddest rap label, Death Row. After Shakur's death, Alexander severed ties with the label, so it is his honest observations of the workings of Suge Knight's gangsta empire that proves most compelling--Snoop Doggy Dogg and his coterie of rappers come across, for instance, as little more than a bunch of stoned little mall-rats. For a detailed history of the West Coast-East Coast feud that led up to Tupac's death, Alexander is maddeningly vague--"If you're a rap fan, you probably know more about it than I do", he shrugs--but it's evident that he is as qualified as any as an authority on Tupac's drug-abusin', lady-lovin' personal life. To Got Your Back's credit, little here is left to the imagination. --Louis PattisonRead More