CATHY SCOTT They could easily just name Orlando Anderson as the killer, close that case. They won’t do it. It’s almost like it is stubbornness on their part. Because all the evidence points to it.
GREG KADING We have a tendency of forgetting that this is twenty-five years later. This plays out in a very slow, almost perfect storm for it not to be solved. First of all, nobody’s cooperating. Nobody in the entourage, nobody that knew that it was the South Side Crips, was coming forward and going, “Hey, I saw Keefe D in the parking lot right before the shooting in a white Cadillac.” Nobody’s talking to the cops about that. They’re not getting any of that information; that didn’t come until long after, a decade later. They’re sticking to the street code.
CATHY SCOTT Everybody who was in the car that night, they’re all dead—except for Keefe D, if he was in the car; I was never told that Keefe D was in the car until later. One of those guys ended up dead in that bloodbath during the days when Tupac was alive.IX That’s when some of the people who were in the car got killed, and that’s really where justice was meted out.
GREG KADING Of course, in 1998, Orlando died.X Until we got involved almost thirteen years later, we didn’t even actually know exactly who was in the car. And nearly everybody in there has died, like universal karma. Orlando died in the exact same way that he should have died; like, perfect justice.
KENDRICK WELLS I recorded some footage for a song called “Unconditional Love.” It was originally entitled “Things Change.” Tupac went ahead and called Johnny J and told him to meet him at a certain time. Tupac went to Tower Records and grabbed this sample. And Johnny J hooked that shit up, like, instantly. They brought in a bass player, a guitar player, and a keyboard player in the making of this song. Johnny J and Tupac are bantering back and forth, having fun, laughing, and, you know, recently I was looking at footage, and it was like that was the last of the peaceful times. They’re all having fun. I look at this video and I’m like, Damn, four dudes in this video are dead.
STELLA NAIR One of the things that I think is really important to emphasize is how important Túpac Amaru II is to indigenous people today. It’s very common to see the motif of the execution of Túpac Amaru on most of the textiles in the Cusco area. Everybody knows about him in the indigenous communities, and you’ll find his representation in a lot of different arts. And what’s interesting to me is that the way that he’s remembered is the execution. Most commonly, he’s being quartered. It’s the moment when his limbs are tied to horses and his body’s being ripped apart. That’s a really powerful statement that elicits anger.
Today—and I speak from the community that I have been working with—he’s seen as an inheritor of the Inca. And I think that’s a really powerful statement because it acknowledges that indigenous people and individual indigenous community identity don’t end with the arrival of Europeans. That resistance doesn’t end, and that alone is just a really powerful movement in history to remember. He symbolizes so much about that continuity to the longer path and the counternarrative to “The Europeans came and everything crumbled.” Everything he represents goes against all those different misconceptions.
X
BARBARA OWENS He was reading the third act in Othello, where he was about to snuff her out with the pillow. He got through the scene and I stopped him and said to all the class, “You will never, ever hear or experience a reading of Othello like this ever again in your life. Remember this moment.” And I was thinking, Did they remember that moment when they learned that he died? Did they remember that moment? Because it felt like a hole in my gut. It’s a different kind of knowing of that person. Sometimes it isn’t personal. But it’s still a rather intimate kind of knowing.
DR. JOHN FILDES I can say that the physicians who cared for him were really changed forever.
MARK ANTHONY NEAL I was teaching my first semester at the University of New Orleans. In the fall of ’96, it was my first tenure-track gig. The thing that I couldn’t appreciate at the time, that quickly became something that I paid attention to: I’m teaching, you know, seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old students, who for the most part were about ten years younger than I was, and their connection with Tupac was very different than mine. And the way that they were reacting, the mourning that ensued, it was the thing that stayed with me for a long time.
TIM NITZ I teach at the LA Recording School. I do have a fair amount of students who were born after he passed away. And of all the people that I talked about, or that they find out that I’ve worked with, Tupac is the one that they care about.
RICHARD PILCHER Some years after Tupac died, I took a sort of sabbatical for a year and taught at an American school in England. We had a number of international students, particularly one summer: it was students from all over the world—Saudi Arabia, Italy, you name it. And I didn’t particularly talk about Tupac, but the word got out. Kids came up and talked to me, and I don’t want to be blasphemous, but it was like I was a disciple of Jesus or something. With awe in their voices: “You taught Tupac?!” Yeah. “Oh my god, what was he like? Tell me anything you can tell me.”
We would have dorm checks and I would go into the students’ rooms. I remember this one, I guess he was fourteen and small for his age, white male. I want to say he was from Italy, but I could be wrong. And there were posters of Tupac on practically every inch of wall space. I realized then what an international phenomenon Tupac was. I had no concept until these kids would just flock around me. I was sort of stunned. I suppose it’s the same as if I taught Elvis or John Lennon. It was that kind of awe it inspired, and it felt weird, you know? He was a kid, a nice guy, I taught him, go away. But that was kind of a revelation for me. I hadn’t really gotten it until that point.
CATHY SCOTT People couldn’t quite imagine someone as full of life as Tupac dying. He’d light up a room. He was like Obama. Full of charisma, like Kennedy. He was like the next Malcolm X. People can’t wrap their brains around that. One day he’s here, the next day he’s gone; they can’t accept it. Even new generations: I taught at UNLV and it was like, “He’s alive, right?” Well, no, he’s still dead.
CORMEGA You know something different is happening when people don’t even want to accept that they’re dead. When they said Biggie was dead, we were sad. When they said Jam Master Jay was dead, we were sad. When they said Big L was dead, or Pun, or Prodigy… But when they said Pac was dead, people didn’t want to accept it. It just goes to show you the impact that he had.
MARK ANTHONY NEAL The hologram at CoachellaI was just eerie, more so than, like, the Michael Jackson example and whoever else got re-created. It was eerie with Tupac, because since Tupac died, there has always been this uneasy feeling that Tupac wasn’t gone. All the rumors about him in Cuba.II The fact that there was a videoIII depicting him entering heaven being released two days after he died. The fact that there was so much music released after his death.
TIM NITZ He had done so many songs that a substantial amount of music came out after the fact, after he passed away. But I think due to legal issues with his mom and Death Row and all that stuff, nothing ever really panned out.
ERIC FARBER There was a lot of unreleased music that was floating around. And so people as far away as Australia had been able to get ahold of this stuff. They were putting albums together. A lot of people were remixing songs and putting those out. One of the duties that I was tasked with, especially early on, was going after websites and going after places that were illegally distributing his content. It wasn’t super early in the days of the internet but early enough that nobody had really sort of gone around and collected the domain names and things like that. Interestingly enough, there was a lot of stuff that was pretty groundbreaking in the legal things that we did on behalf of the Tupac estate. eBay was selling all sorts of merchandise that was knockoff merchandise. Nobody had really gone after them for trademark infringement for sort of acting as a middleman. So we were early in talks with eBay, way back when, on setting up a pr
ogram to be able to have them pull illegal stuff. There was a lot of stuff that we actually did in the early days of internet commerce. We sued Amazon, too. Afeni Shakur was the executor of the estate and she was a fighter. She had been a fighter her whole life.
There were so many buyers; it was pretty insane. There were thousands of websites that I went after, for various things. In the early days, they used to have this process called the ICANN; it was a dispute resolution process. People really weren’t happy about it. There’s some song out there by some obscure rapper who’s, like, killing me in a song. I got this nickname as the Thug Lawyer. People didn’t like that the lawyers had sort of stepped in. Because it was such a massive fan base that felt very entitled.
KENDRICK WELLS We did stuff in San Francisco that didn’t come out until he died. We recorded so many tracks at so many different studios and would’ve expected all of them to be hits because that night—two or three a.m.—you’re listening to this stuff and you’re like, This is genius. But it never came out. Once the estate remixed all the stuff and it started coming out, I started realizing what it was: he wasn’t talking about shooting people; he was talking about the Black struggle. But that stuff didn’t make it to records. Interscope didn’t let that stuff out. They wanted the opposite.
It wasn’t until, like, a few years after he died and I started hearing these remixes that I’m like, Why didn’t they ever play any of this shit while he was alive? I didn’t notice the difference. I wasn’t mature enough yet to notice the shit he wrote at the beginning versus the stuff he was making toward the end. On the Killuminati album, he was awake and spiritual. But the All Eyez on Me shit was just a gangsta party—“Look at me, motherfuckers, y’all tried to hold me down but look at me now.” It was all brilliant shit. I was right there for almost every song that was recorded. And it felt good doing it. But it wasn’t until later, when they started releasing the stuff that I saw him record when we were coming up, that I could see the difference. They wanted destruction over creation.
NAHSHON ANDERSON It wasn’t until I got much older that I started to realize. I was like, Wait a minute: Tupac was at my prom, I got my start working in the TV and film industry because of his internship. That internship opened up all these other doors for me. I would go into some of the Tupac Facebook groups and post about that, and I’d have all these messages from people in Africa talking about how much they love Tupac. I didn’t really respond to them because it was so many of them. I’m just saying to myself, like, All I did was go to my prom and he was there. I didn’t know him. I was just a fan who just happened to be at the right place at the right time and got lucky.
MARK ANTHONY NEAL In 2003, Harvard hosted a talk called “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for the Modern Folk Hero.” As far as I know, it was the first of its kind. It was something that was pulled together by Marcyliena Morgan, who had just established a hip-hop archive at Harvard. And this is really one of the first big events that the archive did. And she was able to draw in so many different folks who had different kinds of impressions of Tupac—whether we were talking about someone like Michael Eric Dyson, who had just published a Tupac book [Holler If You Hear Me] two years earlier, or folks talking about him in the context of stage and theater and visual arts internationally. In retrospect, I don’t think there was another singular figure in hip-hop, at that time, that could have brought together the range of people that were brought together there.
This was the thing about Tupac: However you felt about his music, or his flow, his technical abilities as an artist, he had that thing, the thing that you can’t teach. He was destined to become an icon of that moment. At that point in time, there were no figures in hip-hop like Tupac, dead or alive, that resonated in that way.
The thing that I appreciated about the symposium, and Dyson’s book also, was when I got more of a backstory of who he was, to find out that he was such a voracious reader. And how there were young folks who would read books about Tupac and then go out and read the books that Tupac was reading. In a culture in which we almost accept the fact that young Black men don’t read—that young Black men can’t read—he almost becomes this portal, you know, to a reading life for your Black man.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING Growing up in the Panthers, you’re not gonna not read, because that’s how you learn, and learning was important. And in order for Black people to be liberated, you had to read and understand what was happening around you.
JANE RHODES Young people are looking for models. I’m a college professor. I’ve been teaching some version of Black studies for almost thirty years. And every decade, the Panthers are always this model for a kind of radical Black resistance. As new generations emerge, they’re looking around. Are they going to look to Barack Obama? No. They go to the media icons, the celebrity Black militants. I think Tupac continues to play a role in making the Panthers resonant.
BLU There is a small number of huge organizations that really drive our culture. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and such. Tupac represented the Black Panthers in hip-hop. He seemed to be one person carrying this massive load on his back. It’s unbelievable. He was proud to carry that burden. He never put it down.
NAHSHON ANDERSON The fact that he was able to articulate the experience of so many young Black males who are victims of violence, victims of police brutality, racism, all of the social ills that, you know, we’re forced to deal with… He seemed really, really sincere. I think about what’s going on now, and listening to some of the stuff he was talking about twenty years ago and is still so relevant now, I can’t imagine what he wouldn’t have been doing.
GOBI RAHIMI I think he was the cocoon that was working on becoming a butterfly. I think he was maturing; I think he would have eclipsed the P. Diddys and Jay-Zs, not only in abundance, but in the body of work that he would have created. I also think that he would have probably dabbled in politics or social issues, because that was important to him. I think he knew that he had a responsibility, and I think he would have been a lot more useful to not only his own people, but to all disenfranchised people of the future. In his last days, I saw more calm and respect out of him for the people around him.
KHALIL KAIN I feel like Pac had a very vivid understanding of what he had to offer. I feel like the world was catching up to him. He wasn’t coming into his own. He already owned it. He just needed the right vehicle. And if his schedule permitted, he was more than willing to go and do that movie, or do that TV show, or to do that play. I would have loved to see Pac onstage. And I’m sure that would have been something he would have done in time with maturity and availability and just the freedom to kind of explore.
LEVY LEE SIMON The world lost so much when he passed. I saw his future: sky’s the limit. The way his trajectory was going, he would have been an award-winning, Oscar-winning actor or something like that. He had it. He had the gift.
KENDRICK WELLS I think he was going more toward the movies.
GOBI RAHIMI For the “Made Niggaz” video, there was a DP by the name of Matty Libatique, who went on to do Darren Aronofsky’s films, the first two Iron Man films, A Star Is Born. He’s become a huge DP.
We were doing a setup, and there was a table in the main room, while they’re sort of strategizing how to take over this Piggy and Buffy drug operation in LA. And it was a lit table. I asked Matty to put the camera on the table, but I told him instead of him operating, I wanted him to reverse the handle so it was next to the lens. So Pac or the Outlawz would actually be operating the camera for the single take of the “Made Niggaz” video called the 360.
And you can see the way he moves with the camera, the way he moves in and out of frame—it’s just poetic.
KENDRICK WELLS He had scripts. He had two movies coming out that hadn’t come out yet.IV I think that was his next step.
GOBI RAHIMI I read the Live 2 Tell script Pac wrote.V It was great. It had some amazing plot points, a good story arc. The characters were really well developed. I think
it was a hit. I actually, at one point after he died, had gotten an investment group to come up with $10 million to make it, but, unfortunately, the legal team that was running the estate at that point kind of put the kibosh on it.
Tupac the rapper was more of a well-refined character. As a script writer, he was able to flex all his narrative creativity in writing characters or scenarios—so sensitivity, vulnerability, all of that was very easy for him.
BECKY MOSSING I don’t think there was a ceiling for him. My concern would have been that people would have pigeonholed him. Because people—his management, maybe—would have pushed him to pursue certain roles. There’s such a stereotype with Black men in Hollywood of the kind of roles that they have been allowed to play. I don’t know if he would have been allowed to have moved against stereotypes. If he had been given the opportunity to play a Shakespearean character, oh my god—what the world would have seen. His ability to express himself in verse was wonderful. I think that given the right role, the right director, and if a studio would have taken a chance on him, I think the world would have seen some magic. Maybe he could have reinvented himself.
RICHARD PILCHER I joked with him some years later, when he came back to visit after he started becoming very well known, that we should do a production of Hamlet. I’d love to direct him in Hamlet, and, you know, maybe we could make that happen. Blah, blah, blah. More of a joke than anything else. But the truth is, he would have made a very good Hamlet.
KARL KANI I definitely saw Pac doing more movies and becoming a mega, mega, mega star. I know he enjoyed acting. I know that many people wanted to do movies with Pac. I kind of saw Tupac getting big on the fashion scene. He was headed in that direction. He’s definitely a philosopher. He was the future. He was the leader that’s so missing right now. I think the whole face of hip-hop would have been different if Tupac was alive. He’d check so many rappers for not being down for the culture, not speaking up for Black women. The game would’ve been different. When Tupac spoke, people listened.
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