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And we meet Tupac, who was murdered in 1996 at 25, as a bright, sensitive teenager with a gift for words who would go on to become synonymous with West Coast gangsta rap.

But let’s not forget: She was down with hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a tot and others decried the music as earworm “gangsta rap” that would kill and destroy, not galvanize, the coming generation for whom he — like she — is a folk hero.

But Snoop Dogg the MC, the laconic voice who defined West Coast gangsta rap in the ’90s, never left us.

Meanwhile, across America, Los Angeles was coming into its own as the capital of gangsta rap, led by menacing mogul Suge Knight's Death Row Records, which had Dr Dre and Tupac.

Over the years, The Times spoke to Jones — who died Sunday at 91 — at many junctures in his career, where he recalled being a Black composer in Hollywood in a less-enlightened mid-century climate; making perhaps the biggest pop album of the century with Michael Jackson, and his heartbreak over gangsta rap’s real world violence that touched his family.