Tupac x Inua
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 and he died on September 13, 1996. Better known by his stage name 2Pac, and by his alias, Makaveli, he was an American rapper and songwriter. He is considered to be one of the most influential rappers of all time. In his music, he addressed social issues that continue to plagued inner cities, and he is considered a symbol of resistance and activism against inequality. He was born in Manhattan, New York City, but moved to San Francisco in 1988. At this time, I was a 4 year old rugrat in Jos, Nigeria, unaware of him.
When he moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to further pursue his music career. I to Lagos, Nigeria, I was 9 years old and I still didn’t know who he was. By the time he released his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, he had become a central figure in West Coast hip hop, introducing social issues into the genre at a time when gangsta rap was everywhere. Shakur achieved further critical and commercial success with his follow-up albums Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z (1993) and Me Against the World (1995). The following year, 1996, I moved to London, and I still didnt really get hip hop. I enjoyed music and melody, but I couldn’t understand why in hip hop, the dudes talking over the music seemed to be constantly angry. This was because I was ignorant to many things, racism, inequality, desperation and rage.
Shakur became heavily involved in the growing East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry between 1995 and 1996. On September 7, 1996, Shakur was shot four times by an unknown assailant in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas; he died six days later and the gunman was never captured.
In 1998, two years after the had passed, two years after I had been in London, perhaps she most famous song, Changes, was released. In the song, the line “They get jealous when they see you with your mobile phone” was what pulled me into listening to the lyrics, because a close friend of mine had had his first mobile phone stolen as I waled beside him. His name was Jack, and later on in Change, at 3.30 exactly, Tupac says:
“Don’t let ‘em jack you up, back you up
crack you up and pimp smack you up.
You gotta learn to hold ya own
They get jealous when they see ya
with ya mobile phone”.
It seemed he had posthumously conjured my friend in his song. I began listening, and the more I listened, the more poetry, craft, artistry, flow, voice - the sheer blend of it all - began to grow in me.
I moved to Dublin in 1991. Dublin was in its infancy regarding race relations. After the painful discovery (and experience) of racism in London, I moved to Dublin where things were far worse. There was a belief that Africans could not read, that Black People where backwards and animalistic. In my first English class, I raised my had offering to read from the text we were studying, and the whole class laughed at me. Some days later, in an astonishing show of solidarity, the teacher asked if I was a fan of Tupac’s work. When I confirmed so, she played Do for Love to the class, making them listen in silence as she and I nodded to beat and lyrics. I talked about this incident in a poem called On kindness (commissioned by Andy Craven Griffiths) but what happened next is what deepened my appreciation of Tupac. I joined the school Basketball team.
Naturally, they avidly subscribed to African American culture and hip hop. They knew more about East Coast and West Coast “beef” than I did, and they taught me to really listen. Our school basketball coach was also its best poetry teacher, and him him, in our games and after-game rituals, the worlds collided; poetry beckoned. Tupac’s songs Dear Mama, I get Around, Keep ya head Up, Me Against The World and Brenda’s Got a Baby, began to speak differently to me, and as I listened, I found that they explained Ireland to me. I saw the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the clashes and rivalries that existed between sections of the country, the intense poverty the gripped the area that I lived in, crime in the city and more. The passing fascination I had about Tupac, grew to a profound loss.
I often think of what Tupac would have said about the #BlackLivesMatter movement, about President Donald Trump, President Barak Hussein Obama, about calls for police reform. In Changes, you can find clues:
“Cops give a damn about a negro
Pull the trigger kill a nigga he’s a hero”
“I see no changes all I see is racist faces
Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races”
“And although it seems heaven sent
We ain’t ready, to see a black President”
“It ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact
The penitentiary’s packed,
and it’s filled with blacks”
Thinking about all this led to writing Fuck / Tupac, the first poem in my latest book of poetry, The Actual. The poem reads as many things, and critique of toxic masculinity, crime, brutal policing and more, but first and fore-mostly it is an elegy for Tupac, a lamentation of his premature death.
