OPINION

THE PASSION OF TUPAC SHAKUR II

The Republicans, known for their conservative views on family values were to a larger extent correct in their assessment posed by rap as a new voice that hasn't enjoyed mainstream support for many years, because children needed to be protected against anyone who claimed not to have nothing to lose. The Republicans only failed to accept that they were wrong to deny so many people a voice because someone who hasn't spoken for a long time is likely to come out with millions of issues, as rappers did, and notably Tupac. But what they were also failing to do was to give him awards for the songs he made that explored the ills in black neighbourhoods, like Brenda's Got A Baby, Keep Ya Head Up, So Many Tears, Happy Home, and Dear Mama. Those were his eternal redemption songs to show that the ghetto is not all doom and gloom but there are rays of light. When Stevie Wonder sang, 'uhh child things are gonna get easy' and you heard Tupac humming 'keep your head up' in the background you knew as a single mother trapped in the projects that there was hope - not that sought after sport scholarship or record deal but you could truimph over adversity. 'Take one's adversity/ Learn from their misfortune.../Believe in something/ Believe in yourself/Turn adversity into ambition', he wrote in the poem Ambition over Adversity.

Tupac might have crossed a lot of bridges, busy penning his feelings along the way as best represented in his Me Against the World album. Listen carefully, that's poetry at its best, that's also fear at its worst and a cry for help at its deepest. From If I die Tonite where he, while playing around with rhymes tells of 'call on the coroner come collect the fucking corpse' to the Death Around the Corner where there's a touching line, 'I hope the lord can forgive me/i was a g and getting high was my way of being free'. How many of ya have once thought life was not worth it and found an outlet to channel that anger? If you are down and out and you could write a poem would it be something that your average Martha's Vineyard brat would understand? I guess not. If those GIs in Iraq wrote poetry after engagements would the poems be about the beauty of the Euphrates River which is filled with corpses every morning? Poet Mbongeni Khumalo said that 'it's hard to be optimistic when you live in a storm'.

Maybe Tupac's undoing was his desperation when he was doing hard time at Clinton Maximum at Rikers Island, a jail so notorious people who come from there are rumoured to struggle to find girlfriends due to that 'i can hear his asshole getting torn' statement he rapped about in 16 On Deathrow. And then there is AIDS as well that comes with that torn asshole. Here was a man who couldn't find a job because he shot at off-duty police officers and assaulted film directors, who was denied basic human rights, accused of sodomy he disputed, trying to stay focused and work so that his mother wouldn't be so poor to find the temptation of crack alluring again, then he gets shot five times on his way to help his friend record a song that should shield him from a life of gangbanging, just as the pain is excruciating he gets sentenced to jail, goes there and for some time no one is talking about posting bond or visiting him with good news. Here is the same man seeing felow inmates shanked every night and believing the same people who shot him outside Quad Studios in New York are ganging up to finish what they started in the shower one night, maybe after raping him. Listen to that song 'You ain't never had a Friend Like Me and you'll feel that pain, 'shedding crocodile tears just got life plus/ and you wonder if these white judges like us/ just stay strong strong we'll appeal nigga you'll be free/ down with you to the very end/ cuz you ain't never had a friend like me'

This is where things went extremely twisted. White does not entertain this part a lot apart from mentioning that Tupac got married at the Island and had celebrity visitors like Madonna who all wanted him to know they were thinking of him in their own way while receiving their stars at the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Tupac then, not seeing his 'niggaz' paying him house calls or writing letters started circulating the rumour that it was Sean 'Puffy' Combs and Christopher 'Notorious BIG' Wallace who set out to do him. Of course he did not mean it but he knew that claiming that the biggest selling rapper of the time with his album Ready to Die LP is implicated meant cats on the streets would take notice and remember that 'a Tupac' who quite recently told them that 'no matter what you do niggaz never die/ we just retaliate with hate and we multiply' is rotting in some god-forsaken island prison. Combs later told the same VIBE magazine that Tupac claimed the conspiracy in that he went to see him and the son of the Panther squashed the rumour and they agreed on doing a song together once 'Pac was out. Tupac got mad because Combs had enough to bail him out but he didn't do it.

That stunt worked because it alerted Marion 'Sugar Bear' Knight whose Death Row Records had been receiving a serious pounding from Combs' Bad Boy roster on the charts to realise that the only person who can tip the scales in his favour was incarcerated Tupac. With what Afeni Shakur later called a fraud contract signed in the absense of a legal representative 'Pac was out of jail on a $1million bond and on his way to 'death row' where his mere arrival pushed Dr Dre out of the successful company into Aftermath where Dre himself said ‘there ain’t nothing after that’. And whether Suge had anything to do with it or not one of the first engagements that 'Pac attended in LA on his way out of Rikers was the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack party where all the people who contributed to the project were being hosted by Kenneth 'Babyface' Edmonds.

And according to the rumour mill this is where the famed act that gave birth to the song Hit 'Em Up might have been conceived. 'First off fuck your bitch and the clique you claim/westside where we ride come equipped with game/ you claim to be a player but i fucked your wife'. This is not stuff you say on a song and expect to get away with. Not with your boss later telling the Source Awards that anybody who wants to make money should join his company. This is not stuff you associate with and still expect to make Gridlocked and Gang Related films as if nothing has happened. This is not gibberish you tell a concert, even bragging about having used a rubber and expect to see your grey hair. This is, in any culture, stuff you say and get stoned to death after a ten minute trial in a kangaroo court. It was not different with Tupac as his stoning came on the night of September 7, 1996 after a Mike Tyson bout. In Biblical times they used stones to lynch unrepentant sinners but in 1996 they throw chrome slugs.

But then since his death at the age of 25 Tupac has made more impact than he did when he was alive. Only sad that the police have never bothered to find out who snuffed him. His only weakness was his inability to shut his big mouth and let other people speak. He said he'll be remembered for his big mouth, and eleven years later that's what's still echoeing in our ears. There's been a body of work released after that including the much-acclaimed 7 Day Theory, The Don Killuminati where he came out as Makaveli The Don, his ruthless revenge-driven alter-ego. 'murder muthafuckas lyrically and i ain't gon' cry/ me a born leader'. Here Tupac was finally acknowledging his leadership credentials. Qualities displayed in the Outlawz LP Still I Rise where Tupac sounds as if he was on an atonement tip with The Good Die Young, Baby Don't Cry and Teardrops and Closed Caskets standing out.

With the ruthlessness of Makaveli which had lines like 'throw him up against the wall/ close his eyes/ since you lie/ you die/ goodbye' he had songs that showed his human side like Hold Ya Head and Just Like Daddy.

After that it was his previously unreleased works in R U Still Down and others which showed the commitment he put to his work, especially rap. Very few people have died leaving behind such a huge catalogue of their work, which included his Gang Related, Smile, Toss It Up, I ain't Mad at Cha videos which debuted after his death and cremation. To end much speculation about his fake death Shock G from Digital Underground told an interview that he took part of Tupac's burial, splashing his ashes on the Pacific Ocean.

Today Tupac has influenced rappers like 50cent, The Game, Eminem, Nas, Jay Z, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Immortal Technique and many others. Nas once said, 'show one rapper that I ain't influenced' but for today the question should be, 'show us one rapper that Tupac ain't influenced'.

Tupac was a youth who lived and died still struggling for that 'ghetto up in heaven and it's ours/ black power'. In the event of South Afrika's Youth Day it becomes important to ask, 'what are the young people all over the world doing to emulate Tupac's struggle to rise above poverty? If only every young person did half of what the son of the Panther did, everyone would realise that we can be roses that grew from a crack on the concrete, 'Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet/ Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,/ it learned to breathe fresh air/ Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.'

THE SECOND COMING – MAKAVELI THE DON
Yodemo publisher St Lucas tha Ribelatti reincarnates the legend of Tupac Shakur through his ruthless attack of the book that started it all. This is the second coming that all his fans have been waiting for the whole decade and Tupac’s much fancied reincarnation.
The legendary Tupac Amaru “Don-Killuminati – Makavelli” Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas 11 years ago. Born to a Black Panther activist, he lived his life as an intelligent young man who was forced to embrace folly in order to be “The Man.” In his early twenties, Shakur's respect for the world and especially women dwindled to the level of misogynist. But one thing that the world failed to kill off in Shakur was his poetic/activist spirit. In Rebel For The Hell of It, the author highlights the tragic regression of a Negro who went from a star to a monster. While Shakur tried his best to represent the suppressed voice of the dark-skinned population in America, his enemies bragged that they were richer than he, forcing him to choose between be real and being reel. It's either the money or the soul; that's what Shakur was faced with as you page through the book. One thing I noticed about Shakur, even outside of this book, is that he was far from being a businessman. Shakur would never go the level of Jay-Z, but would keep on being a Nas with a thuggish soul. Once upon a series called Hardcopy on SABC 3, a newspaper owner told the editor one statement that made me think of Shakur. He said about the all-understanding editor who gave moral support to his staff, “You see this people as your family, don't you? You are like a father to them?” The editor grudgingly answered “yes.” Then the cutthroat mogul replied, “Well, it is clear that you are not a businessman, you are a father, go home and be with your children, you don't belong in business.”

For me, throughout this book and other sources on Shakur's life, it is clear that this Negro was a poet and activist, not a businessman. He was heavily affected by the effects of war and capitalistic exploitation, but unfortunately he learned the hard way that those were the tenets of capitalism. Like Mario Puzo once wrote, “There is no great fortune without a crime.” In the company of Marion “Suge” Knight, Shakur realised the truth of that statement. According to various hip hop reports, Shakur is the best selling rap star of all time, with over 50 million records sold. However, his pocket never attested to that reality as much as that of Jigga would. Therefore, reading this book is like traveling through the shoes of a Negro exploited because of a good heart that failed to become cruel, not even under the guise of Makaveli. For him to hold up the Grandiose Dellusion he had about being Makaveli, Shakur had to stay on drugs and alcohol. He never went a day without smoking Lebake, or having a gulp of Bodila. I must say, a version of Brenda Fassie, whose heart was on the people, not on the business.

Rebel for the hell of it is an academic diss with merit. In terms of lingual relevance this book doesn’t cut it for the hip hop head clad with hanging T-shirts and bandanas. It goes to the varsity brain that knows how to leap-frog in between the intellectual debate raised by culture critic, Armond White, within a maze of words defying limited schooling but consistently calling for the reinstatement of the dictionary. In simple terms, if you are not a bookworm, this book should be blasphemy to your cherished belief in modern ignorance. The only merit that this merciless portrayal of Tupac Amaru Shakur’s life of constant battle with himself and the seemingly antagonist world, is that it’s a kind of book Shakur would have read. Intellectual that he was, with over hundred academic books read by him, this book makes the list that would have graced his eyes, and challenged his mind to think.

From the Introduction to the Discography, White does not apologize for portraying Shakur in the way that he viewed himself. In fact he stands justified, except for the title of the book, which sounds pretty much like a marketing gimmick. Shakur was a fuck-up to his society, yes – nothing unique about that, except for his unmatchable talent. The author is able to juggle insult and justification, for himself and the subject (Shakur), in his attempt to perform an academic postmortem of what to many was a legend still alive within conspiracy cycles.

In the four years that I have tried my best to read this book, I realized recently that the only thing that kept me trying was the Life – and Death – of this powerful wordsmith. I’m not hating, you need to buy this book, but unless you are an author yourself don’t expect to understand (or is it overstand) it soon. In this book, White has failed dismally to reach Shakur’s fans, but surely has achieved reaching the targeted audience: Folks who thought hip-hop was just another form of music. I doubt if White was even trying to reach any of us. Yes, I’m not just a reviewer; I am also a fan. Somehow, in the past years I have been trying to read this book, I have managed to stand in between the gap created between the intelligentsia and the fanatics. Therefore, I will say from an academic view that this book is a great attempt. From a fanatic view I will say “What the fuck?” The only thing a fan recognizes in this academic attempt is the picture work and some of the quoted lyrics. The rest, it needs a few years and a college degree.

However, it must be said that white has been able to depict Shakur in the way that he saw himself in the mirror. He saw him with through a limited view that Shakur saw himself – a view only possible to go beyond through the eyes of Freud. The fact that he quoted Russel Simmons as saying about Shakur that “It was just that rebelliousness for the sake of it.” That’s a sheer lie, or a dim observation, which somehow stamped the title of the book. Any true fan would know that Shakur rebelled for a cause, not for the hell of it. Any psychoanalytic academic would also know that Shakur’s rebellion had taken years to harness, until it couldn’t be contained any more. Hence, at the end, White has failed both the Freudian academic and Machiavellian fan. Yet, he hasn’t failed Shakur, who expressed himself in a way that justifies White’s observation. In White’s words, Shakur saw himself as a music-Hollywood victim deceived and manipulated and turned into a moneymaking machine.

Shakur regretted his role in rap as the industry made profitable fodder of them all. Fodder is what Shakur saw in his mirror every time he reflected on his achievements. White cites a conflict between a “political desperation and their material yearning.” Shakur was a failure to himself because he came in the game as a voice but ended up as an ATM for moguls like Suge Knights and friends. As White reveals in the book, Shakur was nothing close to a businessman but a young Negro engaged in an endless search of joy at the midst of a “moral impasse” caused by a version of American Apartheid. This is where the psychology creeps in. Shakur was not a hell-of-it rebellion, but a defense mechanism with which he concealed his vulnerabilities, which bordered at the periphery of penal dismorphophobia. These hidden fears are what I call the Vu-In complex. This means the Vulnerability and Inadequacy complex. The two concepts represent the deeper fears that none of us ever want to feel, especially while others are watching.

White frankly puts it: Tupac himself bequeathed to the hip hop nation the same irrational bluster that he could depend upon to GET ATTENTION. Although I agree, I must emphasize that Shakur rebelled because he had to – it was a let-out of his deeper fears despite his intelligence. The Vu-In complex can strip a person naked to the level that they don’t see the contribution they make in society. White admits that Shakur carried the weight of a disenfranchised black American youth, which unlike their British counterparts “felt additional weight from the race-based system of oppression and discouragement.”

White continues to probe and prophesy: Tupac’s death raises questions about the future of Black popular music. Well, today it is clear that since Shakur’s early death, the only rapper who brought an advancing conflict to the future of Black popular music (not Black popular musicians) was the White Eminem. He is the replica of Shakur’s legend expect for a few excusable features on the race frontier. So far, Eminem, real name Marshall Matters, has been the only rapper who managed to stay on the emotional side of hip-hop. That’s what Shakur was all about, a point which confused the critic in White as he typed away at a failed academic observation. While he acknowledges the enigma of Tupac, later known as Makavelli, he however persists to demean the Tupacism that defined Shakur in the media and all entertainment circles.

What White fails to acknowledge is that Shakur was not a multi-media entrepreneur, but poor poet touched by the malice that blanketed the entire world without any finger being lifted to bring change. Thus, although he wanted to be known to his enemies as a moneymaker, Shakur’s lyrics always betrayed the activist in him. From my personal observation, if Shakur had a choice of healing AIDS or owning a billion dollars, he would have chosen the former. His was a heart plagued by injustice. His rough persona manifested beyond control when he joined Death Row after months of incarceration. It was as if jail had murdered the activist in him, a symptom of trauma similar to that suffered by rape victims, whose Vu-In complex manifested even the worst. After jail, also as revealed by White’s critique, it was like Shakur was now on a vengeance tip. Such behaviour was never seen when he was shot five times. Me Against The World sounds like a scary title but it carries a voice of a nigga searching for help. However, a less scary title, All Eyes On Me, sounded like a nigga bitten by a human snake; a nigga searching for no explanation but vengeance. And Death Row happened to be there at the moment, a point well depicted in Chapter 16.

There are scarring moments in White’s book when you realize that Michael Jackson’s sister, Janet, now married to Jermaine Dupree, ill-treated Shakur when she insisted he get an Aids test before acting out a meager love scene with her on Poetic Justice. Just like the bitches in Shakur’s early development, this lady demanded he get tested although she wasn’t really going to have sex with him. Perhaps unlike White, who is quick to judge, we can only assume that Jackson had a secret plan to seduce Shakur into boning her for really, perhaps after the film. It was this kind of attack that made Shakur a rebel; it protected or defended him from the world of criticism, provoking his Vu-In complex to complicate him to a level only Brenda Fassie could reach.

Yet, due must be given to White for including Dear Mama in his critique. Although he purposefully, or now truly academically portrayed Shakur as suffering from a quasi-Oedipal complex, including Dear Mama invoked feelings of sensitivity that truly marked Shakur’s mental disposition. Those who know the song know the impact it carries – to a level that no song in the world dedicated to a mother can match Dear Mama. This is a point White’s academic criticism fails to overwhelm. White goes on to explore Shakur’s body and love for Gangsters and obsession with West Coast. As you page though the barbed wire diction you realize that this book has been well written, something that would have equally upset the late Delores Tucker as much as Shakur’s songs pretended to.

At the end of the day, White is a hell of a writer, but more so for academics more than for fans. He raises good questions while of course making bad judgments and giving weird analogies. If I were you I would get the book as soon as possible, it beats the theories that Shakur is alive. 11 years down the line, indeed 9 bullets couldn’t drop him, he took ém and smiled as he entered a rest he needed as revealed in the introduction of the book when Afeni Shakur meditated on her son’s passing.

Isn’t it something that Shakur shared a birthday with the birth of freedom? Think about it while you rummage your way through them book shops. As for this one, be prepared to read, it’s not an easy read – had to pop a few just write the damn review. 4kof

Read more of similar analysis, visit yodemo today.
4kof satan

FEATURE

THE PASSION OF TUPAC SHAKUR


One of the most misunderstood serious contributors to pop culture, Tupac Amaru Shakur would have turned 36 on June 16 hadn't bullets cut his short life shorter on the glitzy streets of Las Vegas 11 years ago. One reviewer wrote in a column about Christopher Wallace aka Notorious BIG that 'he died in the innercity that he has both glorified and tried to escape'. It suits Tupac like a glove as well. Tupac was relatively young, at just 25 but his exploits in the music and film industry are unmatched and are setting the benchmark for how this artform and genre will be interrogated in the future.

However through all the years of his absense, between speculations and allegations of him being spotted in the Cayman Islands and Jamaica sipping decarees and suspected messages hidden in his songs about his impending comeback like Jesus, very few people have taken time to understand what made him tick. What made him different from an average rapper and young man in America? Tupac was very vocal about his poor upbringing with a crack fiend mother who he was unfortunate to see deteriorate from a proud Black Panther into an overly dependent Black woman who ended up mothering two children with unsuitable men after many failed pregancies. 'U Taught me 2 be strong/ But I'm confused 2 C U so weak/U Said never 2 give Up/And it hurts 2 C U welcome defeat', he wrote to/for his mother.

In the acclaimed book biography, Rebel for the Hell of It by critical author Armond White you get closer to a churchgoing Tupac who as a teenager did not have a happy home to go to and opted to sleep in recording studio couches. You also manage to get closer to an Afeni Shakur who wanted what was best for young Tupac that she took him to some of the best schools she could afford like the Baltimore School for the Arts. Somehow you start to understand why was Tupac forever acting since it looked like the only life he ever had.

White is optimistic that the stage plays and his MC New York days as an aspiring rapper with a jerry-curl was the making of Tupac the 'revolutionary rev'. His meeting of beautiful Jada Pinkett and striking a friendship that was cut short by his untimely death is explored. Through the book you get to understand that for the better part of his career and life Tupac was surrounded by powerful women who helped him one way or the other. That is why he always remembered to mention that he has never said all women were bitches because he'll be lying. This is what Tupac said about Jada, the young woman he used to play on stage with and who he once formed a music group in Baltimore, "When i think of what a Black woman should be/ It's U that I first think of.../ U R my Heart in Human Form/ A Friend I could never replace". Such a friendship transcended what Tupac later came to be known for.

However there are a lot of contradictions in how Tupac lived his short, often turbulent life, from his Digital Underground days as a roadie, his recording of an album that still has to be released, his first mainstream 2Pacalypse Now and his role in the controversial Juice. In the recording titled after his famous The Rose that Grew from Concrete there is a poem where one rapper remininsces about how Tupac wanted to be accepted by the mainstream when he came out as Bishop, the 'don't give a fuck' thug that came from a broken home and shot a Korean shopkeeper in what was not supposed to even result in a shooting. The big eyed mama's boy with a nose bud.

White argues that at the time Tupac fitted the Hollywood stereotype, 'Young black, angry and not giving a fuck'. He states that after the success of his second Strickly for My Niggaz album and Tupac started roughing some people up Hollywood was reminded of the Bishop from Juice and felt the need to regulate his madness. Tupac might have been accused of going beyond the mandate in Juice but in real life he made Juice look like a comic strip as his brushes with the law became legendary.

Tupac, who told MTV he aspired to play different characters and not just blaxploitation roles teamed up with academy award nominated John Singleton for the Poetic Justice film that did not demand him to gangbang or be a thug but a post office worker on minimum wage. He executed the role so well that instead of encouraging naysayers to welcome him into the fold, they panicked. Pairing him with newcomer Janet Jackson didn't dissapoint either. His outplaying the role was a scary sight for greyhaired Hollywood chiefs. They were intimidated by his talents and saw a Sydney Poitier-Geronimo Pratt-Malcolm X-Louis Farrakhan-Denzil Washington all rolled into one in him, a bad combination.

Remember, here we are talking about a man who claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigations had a plan to exterminate his whole family, from his uncle Dr Mutulu Shakur, his uncles and his aunt who is wanted in the US and exiled in Cuba. His closest family members were shot and killed by police in unquestionable operations and they were not rappers or beefers. Thus when such a man, who, according to White once tried to bring a lawsuit against the Marine County Sherrif's Office for crimes against the Panthers looked to be in a position to take over the world, white America had no sleep. He openly spoke about how the CIA flooded South Central Los Angeles with drugs to keep black people focused on hallucinations while President Ronald Reagan (RIP) recruited the fresh ones to fight secret wars in Nicaragua and Grenada.

Here's a man who after being accused of sexually molesting a 'black' woman would come out and blame the system of finally coming after him instead of reading between the lines of his own temptation and his questionnable treatment of black women. "That's why I'm gon' say I'm a thug that's because I came from the gutter but I'm still here", he pleaded with reporters outside the courtroom during his trial. But where was he when he claimed to be in the gutter? Okay, he was refused roles in films, former US Vice President Dan Quayle was lambasting him in the media, the late senator Delores Tucker was making a habit of using him as the voice of black violence. Old senators who have lived through the madness of Woodstock '69 like Bob Dole were making career comebacks calling for radio stations to ban his music and for retailers not to sell it. And what was Tupac's response, he told a judge that he did request to be treated special in any way but his only crime that he knew the judge was going to punish him for was that he was born black. Crazy heh?

Don't miss The Passion of Tupac Amaru Shakur Part II tomorrow.