The Night the Myth Had to Walk Into a Courtroom

Some stories are too useful to be solved. Tupac’s killing was one of those: a 1996 Las Vegas night that became a business, a documentary mill, a generational bruise, a lyric. Usefulness is not the same as truth. This week, in a courtroom, a man named Duane Davis told jurors he had never told anyone the story, and then he told the police version of the night. CNN sat with the strangeness of that. So should we.

Myth is a crowded house. Evidence is a small room.

I am not going to retry a case in a culture column. I am going to talk about what it feels like when a myth is asked to sit down. Hip-hop’s public memory of that night has been a hall of mirrors: East-West, Death Row, the truck, the intersection, the unsolved as a kind of eternal flame. Eternal flames are warm. They are also a way of not looking.

A jury cannot give you closure. It can only give you a procedure. Sometimes that is the more adult gift.

Lila Voss, The Atlas Culture

Davis walking police through the night is cinematic whether it is true, false, or a third thing people do when they have lived too long with a secret: narrative. Jurors are there to do a job we, online, are spectacularly bad at — holding a story still long enough to test it. The rest of us will clip the testimony and return it to the genre. That gravity is almost irresistible. Resist it anyway.

• Do not confuse a famous death with a complete map of a famous life.
• Do not treat a defendant or a witness as a character you already cast in 2002.
• Do not let nostalgia become a theory of the crime.

Tupac the artist does not need this trial to remain necessary. The work is the work. What the trial might do — if we let it — is retire a piece of our laziness: the idea that an unsolved murder is more meaningful than a solved one. Meaning is not the same as fog. If the law can still pick a night apart after thirty years, culture can bear to be specific too.

I will watch the verdict like a citizen, not like a fan. Fandom got us the myth. Citizenship is the only attitude that gets you anything as unglamorous as a fact.