Tupac: Robbing Men of Their Boners and Women of Their Conjugal Bliss, Even From the Grave

Now I've seen it all.

The Associated Press (killing local reporting since 1846) offers up this report about a lawsuit between civil rights activist C. DeLores Tucker and two Philly newspapers. At issue? "Her dispute with the estate of slain rapper Tupac Shakur," according to the article.

What did that naughty Tupac do? He rhymed "Tucker" with "motherfucker." Oh SHIT!

But wait -- the shit has only begun to fly. According to the AP article,

"Tucker had sued Shakur, alleging, among other things, that her husband, William Tucker, had suffered loss of 'consortium' because of the emotional distress brought on by Shakur."

Oh yes. Consortium. If you think that sounds like some kind of awful Freudian metaphor for something, award yourself one point. Baby, Dictionary.com gives us this legal definition:

"The legal right of husband and wife to companionship and conjugal intercourse with each other."

So let me get this straight: a so-called activist is suing a newspaper for mischaracterizing a Tupac lyric which was so scathing that it prevented her husband from getting a hard-on?

I've got one word for ya:

By the way, have any of you seen the movie Tupac: Resurrection? (Thanks, Olympia, for sending it my way.) It's interesting in the way Born Into Brothels is interesting, which is to say that if you peel back the cutesy, crowd-pleasing surface, there are some very ugly monsters lurking underneath. The selling point is that it's told in "Tupac's own words," and indeed it's compiled from a number of interviews and monologues. But a careful listener will hear that many times, Tupac's speech is spliced together from several different interviews, often in mid-sentence! His speech, his life -- they're so heavily edited to put a positive spin on a man who was one of the most internally embattled characters of his day. By the end of the film, Pac is basically being cast as a black Jesus figure, a patron of the arts, and a sensitive gentleman who only occasionally ran into trouble with the press and the law. It's no coincidence that the film was made by Tupac's mom, Afeni Shakur. You can just see her pulling the strings the whole time.

Guess she had to get him back for "Dear Mama" some way or another.