Notorious.

Two rap colossuses.

Two unsolved murders.

The east coast-west coast beef of the mid 90s seem all but distant memory already.However,the release of "notorious" in theaters this week threatens to both immortalize as well as reopen old,painful wounds.

There seems little contest in the rap world that the notoriuos BIG and Tupac Shakur were the two most gifted,most talented rappers that ever lived.

Both were also consumed by the bitter,often blown-out-of-proportion rift between the east coast and west coast crowds at the time.

When Shakur survived a NY shooting in '94 and implicated biggie and puff daddy,the auto button had been pushed in a short mad stage play that would have a disastrous ending.An ending that deprived the music and poetry world of witnessing the full potentials of two really rare talents.

The raging rivalry between puffy's bad boy records and Suge Knight's deathrow together with the patently troubled and dysfunctional childhoods endured by both Tupac and Biggie combined to ensure the story really had no alternative ending.

With both their lives lived in and out of prison,setting an unfortunate precedence for today's rappers as some kind of right of passage,the law got really tired of these two enigmas at some point and often appeared at a loss as to what to do with them.Lesser charges were frequently dropped altogether.

In the hour after the Tyson bout ended in Las Vegas in '96,a lot happened that will probably never be exactly known as several accounts of events exist.Shakur succumbed to respiratory failure.He failed to cheat death a second time.

What was probably considered an affront to the west coast establishment was Biggie's appearance in LA barely a year after the Tupac assasination.He was booed out of a Toni Braxton award he was presenting.Hours later he,too,was dead.

Today's rapsters have made giant strides towards suppressing the violent rivalries.However,their dalliances with the law still remain a constant feature.DMX is still in jail.So is TI on firearm related charges.

Jay-Z and Puff Daddy are currently high flying executives.They have both since moved out of the hood.They have discovered that it is probably just as important to stay alive as it is to finally get it all together.

Hopefully the inauguration of Barack Obama next week will raise new hopes for black kids in the sort of neighbourhoods Shakur and Biggie grew up in,to show them that there are alternatives to thug life.

I look forward to seeing "notorious" in my local Cineplex.