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and shaking down their communities for whatever blood money they can extort, often from the poorest of poor. To these conditions, N.W.A. dedicated their anthem, "Fuck tha Police!" Tupac Shakur's Me Against the World (1995) paints an especially vivid portrait of life in the inner city. Titles like "If I die 2nite" and "Death Around the Corner" describe the danger and paranoia of living in no- peace zones where bullets fly more than birds, while "Me Against the World," "So Many Tears," and "Fuck the World" express both sadness and rage concerning this plight. Reminiscing about his past, he tells us: I was raised in the city, shitty ever since I was an itty bitty kiddy, drinkin' liquor out of my mama's titty. And smokin' weed was an everyday thing in my household, and drinkin' liquor `till you're out cold. Shakur regrets his mother and the preachers couldn't save him from a life of drugs, drunkenness, and violence. Although he often appeals to God and affirms struggle and hope, he condemns the world that has taken so many of his friends ("I've lost so many peers/I shed so many tears") and which threatens to take his own young life at any moment: "Fuck the world 'cause I'm cursed/I'm havin' visions of leaving here in a hearse. ... Will I survive to the morning to see the sun?" The paranoia of life is intense: "If you're black, you'd better stay strapped," or: "You want to last? Be the first to blast." The expectation of death is especially heightened in Shakur's "Death Around the Corner," which opens with his young son asking him why he is standing by the window with his gun and the father answering that: "My destiny is to die." The rapper explains that "I guess I've seen too many murders" and is prepared for more violence at any moment. Still, he is not afraid to die, figuring that any place will be better than the ghetto: "Don't shed a tear for me nigga/I ain't happy here." The Politics of Rap As concerned citizens and activists, some black rappers consider themselves to be "knowledge gangsters," such as Black Liberation Radio activists like Mbanna Kantako and Zears Miles, who raid U.S. scientific and military documents in particular to find evidence for economic, cultural, and biological warfare against blacks (Fiske 1994). Translating information from white systems into black terms, knowledge warriors reconstruct mainstream or suppressed knowledge into "blackstream knowledge," thus using information and knowledge as tools of struggle and counter-hegemony. Some of this is the black version of a politicized Pynchonian paranoia that mines white information systems for clues as to how white America is preparing genocidal attack on the black population. Paranoia is in fact rampant in the black community; for instance, 1990 polls showed that one-third of African- Americans found it plausible that AIDS had been deliberately created by the government and white scientists as a form of chemical warfare against their people, seeing it more as a "black disease" than a "gay disease," [7] just as many believe the liquor and tobacco companies have targeted black people in specific to hawk their poisons. Some rappers attempt to play a positive role in their community. The initials of the group KRS-ONE are short for "Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone" and the rapper urges his people to put aside the gold chain and braggadocio and to straight out tell people what is happening in the black community. KRS-ONE also began