But Now I Bone H.E.R.

The end of the '60s was captured on film in the Maysles brothers' 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter, which showed the Rolling Stones' "West Coast Woodstock" collapse into violent clashes between hippie fans and Hell's Angels bodyguards, culminating in a death by stabbing.

The writing is on the wall for gangsta rap in Tupac: Live at the House of Blues, a concert DVD of Tupac's last show, opening for Snoop Dogg in L.A. on July 4, 1996.

It's thrilling to watch Tupac keep the crowd rapt through "I'll Never Call You Bitch Again" as he toes the line between romance and misogyny, channeling Marvin Gaye through his thug persona. It's embarrassing, if morbidly fascinating, to watch Snoop piss all over that line (and lose the crowd in the process) with a three-song raunch medley that ends with a member of his Dogg Pound entourage holding the mic up to a bent-over dancer's vagina to "hear the pussy speak."

In Gimme Shelter, a fat white naked hippie in an acid trance approaches the stage, her arms extended, zombie-like. The Hell's Angels beat her off with pool cues. This woman, it seems, manifests all the filth and depravity finally catching up with the hippies.

In House of Blues it is a thirty-something black woman with a librarian's face and clothes who hoists herself up on stage to grind with Snoop. Three Death Row Records handlers step in, get her the fuck off, and bring in more appropriate, ghetto hoochie girls. This frumpish woman represents not chaos, but the encroaching safeness of the new era.

A new sort of gangsta rap fan was in the making, one who didn't even play at being hard. That meant that if Tupac was going to remain an icon on his own terms (not the Disney/porn industry terms Snoop eventually accepted), he had to keep raising the stakes, upping the potential for violence.

His ongoing conflict with Biggie Smalls is an obsession of Tupac's during the show. Between songs, he paces the stage and rants to the crowd about how he's knocked up Biggie's wife, how he's going to kill everyone at Bad Boy and so on.

But watching House of Blues it seems that, more than Biggie and Bad Boy, Tupac was battling against his own destiny. The core of gangsta rap was freedom: freedom to say what you want when you want, freedom to be above the law. But the bargain it struck with corporate America (which had been integral to its success from the beginning) made a sham of this freedom.

House of Blues finds Tupac in the final throes of an un-winnable Cool Hand Luke style battle against rules and regulations of any kind.

Within two months of the show, Tupac was dead and Suge Knight, CEO of Death Row, was in prison, effectively putting the West Coast gangsta rap scene out of comission. Within a year Biggie was also dead and his producer, Puff Daddy, was dominating the pop charts with rap covers of cheesy '80s pop songs masquerading as heartfelt tributes. The two-timing gangsta rap muse had crawled back into her cave to join the summer of love in the annals of history.