Tupac Shakur: lion or loser?
In the summer of 1988, in Marin City, California, Tupac Shakur was the 17-year-old king of rap battles. Known as 2Pac, he was a prodigy – throw him any topic and he could rap about it on the spot. One night, though, he came up against a 13-year-old MC called Tac, who compensated for his cruder skills by telling stories about neighbourhood crooks. Tac won the showdown.
Shakur understood hardship well enough but not criminality. Just a few months earlier, as a student at Baltimore School for the Arts, he had been a sensitive theatre kid who loved Shakespeare, painted his fingernails and performed an expressive dance routine to his favourite song, Don McLean’s 1971 weepie “Vincent”. According to one Marin City rapper, “he couldn’t fight, couldn’t drive, couldn’t play basketball, couldn’t sell drugs”. Following his defeat to Tac, though, Shakur shadowed a fearsome local drug kingpin, like an actor researching a role, and returned with his first gangsta rap number, “Dayz of a Criminal”.
This incident was an early example of the confused duality that defined Shakur’s life. His pillar-to-post upbringing made him a code-switcher, a people-pleaser, a shapeshifter. He showed different sides of himself to different people, except when he lost his temper and became somebody who nobody wanted.
Shakur died after being shot in Las Vegas in September 1996, at the age of 25. His short, tumultuous life has been chronicled, and mythologised, more than any other rapper. Other MCs may have more dexterity and a better strike rate, but Shakur was bigger than his music. In life he had the kind of mind-scrambling charisma that is akin to sorcery. In death he is a smouldering saint whose face, like Bob Marley’s, adorns murals and T-shirts around the world. In Words for My Comrades, a biography published earlier this year, Dean Van Nguyen anoints him as “the last great revolutionary figure”.
That is not the man who emerges from Jeffrey Pearlman’s rigorous, unsentimental new biography, Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur. Pearlman, a bestselling sportswriter, interviewed almost 700 people: friends, family and ex-girlfriends; rappers and actors; cops and crack dealers; a coroner, a paramedic, a therapist. Most of what he learned isn’t flattering but he writes up his findings with a reporter’s diligence rather than revisionist glee. “Few Homo sapiens have experienced as much raw-level insanity as Shakur did over his 9,220 days on Earth,” he claims.
Pearlman’s prose can get a little sweaty, but then his subject does tend to inspire hyperbole. Over the course of the book, Shakur is compared by various people to Stevie Wonder, Toshiro Mifune, Bob Dylan, James Dean, James Baldwin, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jordan, Mozart, Beethoven, Muhammad and Gandhi – none of whom began their careers by simulating sex on stage with a blow-up doll. He is also described as a “time bomb”, an “asshole” and a “boneheaded motherfucker”.
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We’re halfway through the book before Shakur releases his debut album, 1992’s 2Pacalypse Now, by which point Pearlman has pieced together a compelling psychological portrait of a young man shaped by “chaos, disruption, pain, uncertainty”. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a Black Panther who became a counter-cultural celebrity in 1971 for successfully conducting her own defence in the Panther 21 trial while pregnant. She christened her son Lesane Parish Crooks to conceal his identity from law enforcement but soon renamed him after the 18th-century Inca rebel Túpac Amaru II. He had radicalism in his blood. Trauma, too.
Shakur’s filial ode, “Dear Mama”, was a whitewash. He grew up without a father, and often enough without a mother too; Afeni was a crack addict who foisted him on friends and relatives. “There’s nothing romantic about Afeni’s story,” attests long-time family friend Yaasmyn Fula. “She was a very troubled and vulnerable woman.” Notwithstanding the bohemian interlude of Baltimore School for the Arts, Shakur experienced the worst social problems of his generation: homelessness, police harassment, gang violence, the crack epidemic. “I’m not hard, I’m soft,” he said in his first record label bio. “Life’s made me crazy soft. If you hit me, I’ll fall.”
But he wanted to be hard. Nothing shows Shakur’s conflicting aspirations better than the fact that in 1990 he abandoned a black activist organisation called the New Afrikan Panthers to tour as a back-up dancer for the funk-rap group Digital Underground – hence that blow-up doll. The group found his hyperactivity maddening. He craved attention, had sex with several women a day and could only calm down when he was stoned. Pearlman calls him “a child in a man’s body”.
Although 2Pacalaypse Now flopped, Shakur’s movie debut as the nihilistic killer Roland Bishop in Juice (1992) made his name. Shakur claimed to prefer acting to rapping (he auditioned for the role of Bubba in Forrest Gump), but his undeniable raw talent was matched by his immaturity, lack of professionalism and capacity for alienating cast and crew. “His human self isn’t as likable as his artistic self,” says his co-star from the film Above the Rim (1994) Wood Harris. “He was always high. A pain. And Napoleonic.” On the set of Poetic Justice (1993), he was scolded by none other than Maya Angelou. “There’s a reason Shakur was never in a great film, and I guess it comes down to trust,” says the director Allen Hughes. “No one trusted him.” Hughes speaks with authority. He was assaulted by Shakur, as were a limo driver, a record label owner, an audience member and two off-duty police officers. Many people had noticed Shakur adopting the persona of Bishop, whose motto was “I don’t give a fuck”. This was Bishop behaviour.
Shortly after midnight on 30 November 1994, Shakur was shot multiple times during a robbery at Quad Studios in Manhattan, adding a self-inflicted bullet to the testicle as he fumbled to draw his gun. The next day, Shakur was acquitted of rape but convicted of sexually abusing a woman named Ayanna Jackson. Pearlman doesn’t adjudicate but he does uncover an unnervingly similar allegation from four months earlier. Shakur was sentenced to at least 18 months in a maximum-security facility, where Me Against the World, his first great album, made him the first person ever to top the Billboard charts while incarcerated. Aware that his celebrity made him a target, he endeavoured to purge his softness by working out fanatically and reading Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.
Enter, amid a cloud of sulphur, Marion “Suge” Knight, the founder of Death Row Records. Knight, a hulking bruiser with a reputation for violent intimidation and tyrannical cruelty, exploited Shakur’s siege mentality and financial insecurity to become both his benefactor and controller once he was out on bail. Although Shakur’s next album, All Eyez on Me, went double platinum, he possessed less than $200,000. The high life he enjoyed was financed out of his future royalties. “It’s all for show,” he admitted. “I’ve got nothing.”
While in prison, Shakur had convinced himself, without evidence, that his 1994 shooting had been a hit ordered by his former friend and New York counterpart the Notorious BIG, aka Biggie Smalls. His paranoia set off an increasingly bitter war of words between West Coast and East Coast rappers, stoked to a frenzy by Death Row and the hip hop press, which only ended after both he and (in an unrelated shooting) Biggie were dead. Shakur bared his divided soul by recording his most forgiving song (“I Ain’t Mad at Cha”) and his most sadistically unhinged (the Biggie-baiting “Hit ’Em Up”) just two weeks apart in October 1995. In his final year, he was engaged to Kidada Jones, daughter of music legend Quincy Jones, and taking his acting career seriously. He even talked down the feud he had initiated and revived his interest in black solidarity. He appeared ready to outgrow his role as the thug prince of Death Row.
Ultimately, Shakur’s furious bravado was the death of him. On 7 September 1996, while walking through the MGM Grand in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson fight, he tore into Orlando Anderson, a member of the Crips gang who had attempted to rob one of his crew two months earlier. It was a catastrophic decision. Later that night, a white Cadillac pulled up alongside Shakur’s BMW sedan and a gunman, suspected to be Anderson, shot him four times. Six days later, he stopped breathing. “He died a wannabe thug,” James McDonald, a repentant Death Row henchman, reflected years later. “A damn wannabe. How fucking pathetic is that?”
There are other ways to remember Shakur. Writers like Van Nguyen have accentuated his revolutionary inheritance – as a teenager Shakur joined the Baltimore branch of the Young Communist League and talked about relaunching the Blank Panthers. In interviews, like the one sampled on Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, he could present himself as a street philosopher: thoughtful, principled, self-aware. You can hear that version of Shakur in compassionate protest songs like “Keep Ya Head Up”, “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and his posthumous hit “Changes”, which united the socially acute Public Enemy fan with the sentimentalist who cried to Don McLean. “Let’s change the way we treat each other,” he pleaded.
That may be who Shakur aspired to be but, as Pearlman illustrates, it is not how he chose to live. According to the rapper Dupré Kelly, Shakur’s tragic paradox was that he was “caught up in the stuff he was actually trying to stop”. One can only imagine who he might have become if he had never met Orlando Anderson, or Suge Knight, or Ayanna Jackson. Perhaps the person his lionisers need him to have been.
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac ShakurJeff PearlmanHarper Collins, 464pp, £25.00
[Further reading: Bobby Vylan is feeling sorry for himself]
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