In 1992, Death Row Records was making it happen. A fledgling West Coast record label founded by Suge Knight and the producer Dr Dre, it had been in business only a year when, in December 1992, The Chronic exploded on to the stereos of America and the world. In September 1993, Death Row followed up Dre's global smash with a second album . . . Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle. All of a sudden, gangsta rap and Death Row Records were huge.

Those two albums alone have sold more than 13 million copies, a testament to not only the immediacy of their music but their enormous social appeal to millions of young men all around the world. Death Row Records not only sold a sound; it sold a lifestyle. But its zenith would last only four years . . .

from December 1992, when Dr Dre's debut album hit record stalls, to 13 September 1996, when a surgeon at the United Medical Hospital in Las Vegas pronounced Tupac Shakur dead.

Knight's empire may have survived the execution of its star artist, but, almost 10 years on, it has received a fatal shot. Last year, Knight was ordered to pay $107m to Lydia Harris, whose prisonbound ex-husband, Michael Harris, says he co-financed the birth of Death Row. This month, Knight sought federal bankruptcy protection.

A fleshy behemoth, Knight became a bodyguard for the soul singer Bobby Brown in 1986. In 1987, Knight was arrested on charges of attempted murder. He had shot a man in the wrist and the leg after an argument.

In 1991, Dr Dre left Ruthless Records to start a label with Knight. Eazy-E would later claim in a lawsuit that Knight threatened him with a baseball bat and pipe to make him release Dre.

Knight and Dre formed Future Shock Records in early 1992 . . . they soon changed it to Death Row Records. Dre was soon experimenting with new sounds. Aided and abetted by Snoop Dogg and Warren G, Dre pioneered what would become known as G-funk. It took the form of gun-heavy lyrics delivered over a backing track that featured a slowed funk sample, heavy with female vocals and synthesisers. G-funk dominated America's airwaves for four years.

In 1994, Tupac Shakur, a film star and rapper on Death Row's books, released his Thug Life album, and quickly became one of the West Coast's stellar exports, but he found himself on trial for sexual assault that November. In the same month he was shot five times in a Manhattan studio lobby, and robbed of several thousand dollars' worth of jewellery. The day after he was shot and robbed, he was convicted of sexual abuse.

He would serve only eight months of his four-and-a half-year sentence before Suge Knight bailed him out to the tune of $1.4m.

In February 1995, Knight got 30 days' jail and five years' probation, having pleaded guilty to a drugs charge.

Notoriety was one of the key attractions of gangsta rap. A little crime-related press did no harm to album sales. Proof that being bad was good for Death Row came with Tupac Shakur's 1996 offering, All Eyez on Me, the first double album in rap and the fastestselling rap album in history.

But Dr Dre recognised that trouble was heading Death Row's way, and left in June 1996. On 7 September, after a Mike Tyson fight, Shakur and Knight were involved in a scuffle with a member of the LA Crips gang. Knight and Shakur were shot later that night. Shakur would die five days later, and Knight would spend the next five years in jail for breach of parole. Since then, Death Row has been disintegrating.

Legal attacks have hurt its finances. Artists have left . . .

most notably Snoop Dogg, in 1997. Even when Knight reappeared from prison in 2001, promising to reinvigorate the label, there was little he could do. Death Row has stayed afloat only by carefully managing its back-catalogue. But it has been a legacy label for the past decade.