Changes

by Sheldon Pearce

  NAHSHON ANDERSON There were so many people that respected him and looked up to him, and loved him. And for me, I’m forty-two, and the impact that he had on my life—I’m still in the field of work that I want to be in, and to a degree, it’s because of him giving me that head start. Even though he was a hard-core, you know, gangsta rapper or whatever, I would say he was just as smart as Obama. He obviously wasn’t going to be the president, but he definitely would have been able to move more younger people in the right direction.

  KARL KANI Tupac, he’s one of the main reasons why my brand is still the number one streetwear brand in Europe right now—because they worship him like a god. Once the internet hit, and now, all these kids in Germany, Japan, can start googling and seeing what he’s wearing over a period of time, that’s when it really started to happen. You feel me? That’s when the power of Tupac started to really, really happen—when people was able to get on the internet and do research themselves. That’s when they really saw the impact that he had and what he used to wear.

  BLU You can see his contribution to this life in his short twenty-five years, how big his impact on this world was. Everything that he represents, I champion, I put on a pedestal. There’s no way anyone can sit in a seat and think that they can compare themselves to Tupac. I realized that there was someone out there that represents being fearless.

  LEVY LEE SIMON A lot of people talked about the fact that he was already getting away from the gangsta rap kind of grind and more into politics, into more Afrocentric kinds of stuff to uplift and speak to people. At his core, he was political; he was a revolutionary. And I think that his work would have been revolutionary. Not only as a rapper, but also as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, as a public figure, as a speaker.

  BLU Man, Tupac is the most passionate artist that I’ve ever listened to, let alone in hip-hop, which is a very, very competitive sport. It enabled him to become one of the best songwriters that we’ve ever heard. And it made him feel larger than life—like the biggest daredevil there ever was. You got Tupac blasting at unjust police officers. That’s unheard of, to this day. You have Tupac laying down the law.

  GOBI RAHIMI It’s interesting, in retrospect. I would always see or hear Pac’s anger toward the police and racism and all of that, and I thought I completely understood what Tupac was talking about, but only after George Floyd’s murder, and all of these videos that have surfaced, did I really realize what he was talking about. He had a revolutionary rage. And as his mom once said so aptly, Pac would never bend his knee for anyone. I had an appreciation for him posthumously that I wish I had spoken up on while he was alive.

  WENDY DAY I think he would have become a leader, provided somebody else didn’t kill him or the government didn’t kill him. History tells us that absolutely is not off the table. I think he definitely would have been some sort of a leader. I see a lot of him in Killer Mike. I see a lot of him in a lot of people that stand up to injustice. I look at people like Tekashi 6ix9ine and I wonder what Pac would have thought about him or how he would react to him, because I saw Meek Mill blast him and that was very Pac to me.VI I definitely see Pac doing that, only not backing down. I can see him just crushing this kid.

  ROB MARRIOTT 6ix9ine once said that the reason why he did the things he did was because he thought rap was real. He really thought the things that these rappers said, they actually did. Tupac was kind of like that. He took hip-hop very seriously and behaved that way to his detriment at the time, but, ultimately, to his immortality. That’s what we love about him now and why he’s persistent in the culture. He didn’t use the filters that would keep him safe. He got out in front of that sight and just kept preaching what he believed. It was like a really conscious suicide in a way—a long five-year process where he committed suicide because he felt the message was more important.

  JUSTIN TINSLEY What he was phenomenal at was taking that Black experience and composing it into art. The same way Richard Wright was as an author or James Baldwin was as an essayist—in terms of telling you about the conditions of his community. He’s going to tell you in the most explicit way possible, because it makes you cringe, hearing it on a record; imagine living it in your everyday life.

  BLU I think his being alive would be as big as a Dr. King or Malcolm X still being alive. There would be a lot more African American leaders standing for us. Tupac still represents Black power. He’s an example of what many Black males should be—legally armed, legally making money, and standing by the culture like no other.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL There are these figures that have emerged historically over the last fifty or sixty years who were killed at a young age, who potentially could have been portals toward different kinds of possibilities for folks. For me in the 1960s, it was Fred Hampton.VII We don’t know who Fred Hampton would have been fully matured. Tupac is in that same tradition. We don’t know who he’s going to become yet.

  I often think about Tupac as this figure, because he was into so many things. He was coming into maturity in terms of finding a way to be both a celebrity in Hollywood and in the music industry, but also was beginning to cultivate his political identity. He was still trying to figure out what that balance was going to be. Because he had this larger trajectory in history in the movement, I think most of us fully expected that he would develop some organizations or institutes that would allow us to reproduce more Tupacs.

  I thought it was important to focus on the possibilities of a Tupac when we don’t get to see that fully realized. What a Tupac at forty years old might have been, who would have been able to offer a kind of critical commentary and self-critical commentary on the rape charge that he caught. I see all of that as something that was coming. It was important to me to think about him as someone who was potentially dangerous. To be able to reproduce the next generation of young Black men in particular, but also Black people in general, who were leaders, who were activists, who were dedicated to a certain kind of Black political tradition.

  I know the folks who were long in the movement—that is, Black Power and Black militancy movements in the sixties and seventies—often talked about the fact that, as he became more famous, there was a desire to protect him. They realized that he was that bridge to another iteration of Black militancy.

  KENDRICK WELLS I think personally he would not be able to survive this time. We don’t have leaders that can say things—not in the Black community and not in the world. I think Tupac would have succumbed to something else.

  MARK ANTHONY NEAL For young folk, so much of who Tupac was, as a person, as an essence, as an artist, has basically been lost and become this kind of flattened caricature of a moment in the mid-1990s.

  Tupac was not a perfect being. He was someone who was a person who was in process and in transition. There’s nothing more human than being in process and in transition. So if young folks could connect to not who Tupac was but the process that he was going through, that would actually still bring them closer to who he is.

  But then for me there’s the question of the absences. In a documentary about his shooting, we find out [about] the friendship that he and Mike Tyson had. As you saw Mike Tyson’s life unravel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you start wondering what Mike Tyson’s trajectory might have been if Tupac was still there. If Tupac and Biggie don’t disappear, culturally, in ’96 and ’97, as they do, there’s no cultural space for Jay-Z to take off. So it has ramifications in terms of who emerges as the public face of hip-hop.

  Tupac is the hip-hop generation’s messiah complex—much the way so many people tried to fill the void of King after his killing in ’68. All kinds of figures have emerged who have become iconic figures. But Jesse Jackson never filled the void in that way. Louis Farrakhan never filled the void that way. Al Sharpton never filled the void in that way. And arguably Barack Obama never filled that void.

  So we see these folks who gesture toward it. Just simply because of his visibility, the person that you think about is probably Jay-Z. But Ja
y-Z has achieved a level of wealth that, quite frankly, I think that Tupac would have never been interested in. And while Jay-Z has done things, besides behind closed doors, in terms of supporting movements, he was always someone who is so conscious of how his image and ideas are being marketed in the world. And that speaks a great deal, just in terms of the economics of hip-hop right now, where so many people are so successful financially that to be political in the ways that Tupac was political is risky. Now you put into question your sponsorships. Hell, that dude Travis Scott has a hamburger meal with McDonald’s.

  For Tupac, that would’ve been unfathomable. The political movement now has become about wealth. I don’t want to dismiss that as not being important. But that’s not the same kind of politics that Tupac was committed to. Tupac was committed to a politics that never left the street. Even as the idea of Tupac gets pushed up into the academy and museums and all these places of high culture, Tupac himself was always committed to the work on the ground.

  VIRGIL ROBERTS I think he would have been one of those seminal figures. He was a huge pop icon. But it’s so hard to say. He was in his nascent form, but he was a smart kid. He was well educated. You hear it in the lyrics he wrote and in the songs that he did. He had a worldview. But he also had a death wish. I don’t know that he would have become more.

  Sometimes when folks die young it’s in part because of the way they live their lives. Maybe they can never become old. Tupac lived on the edge all of the time. That probably would’ve never changed. It’s like trying to predict the weather. So many different factors were at play. You could say, Okay, if we could control this, and he hadn’t been shot, and this didn’t happen, and this didn’t happen, and this didn’t happen, he would have been X. But all those things did happen. And because they did happen, it maybe made him bigger than he otherwise would have been. When you die at your peak, you become immortalized. It’s easy to say, “If this person continued on this trajectory, boy, would they have been rich and powerful and famous and the leader of movements. Yeah.” But that’s forgetting all the other things that affect how we end up where we are.

  ANGELA ARDIS I think he was brilliant. I think that he would have been a huge vehicle for the community, period. I think everything that’s going on right now, he’d have been at the forefront of that. I think if he’d had the opportunity to transform his mindset or his condition—which, I think he was in the process of trying to do that, trying to figure out how to balance that out—he would have been a force to be reckoned with. He could have changed the world; the world would have been his.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD I think Pac would have changed the world. I do believe he would have changed the world. I mean, he was a revolutionary, period. I think his place in life was to illuminate things that were being glazed over. It kind of made him a martyr. To come from what he came from requires a heightened awareness for a child. I think those things kind of groomed him to become a radical member of the music business.

  It sounds like me just championing him, but once you knew this person… he was unabashedly him. If you were a sex worker, he’s a guy who’s gonna be like, “Even though you were a sex worker, I love you.” You probably didn’t want that part told, but he’s still saying you’re amazing. People glorify that relationship because he became this huge celebrity, but he was still a Kennedy Fried Chicken–eatin’ homeboy to me. He never told me, “Yo, call Suge and I’m gonna see if I can call you.” No weird stuff ever happened. He was the same raw, convicted, truthful, giving, supportive person that I always knew.

  People never really focus on the mature parts of that man. He was honest as fuck, and he was receptive to criticism around his actions. Even if he didn’t change them immediately, they weren’t thrown in the trash. You felt like you were talking to a receiver of the signal. Yeah, he was quick-tempered. Yeah, he was spitting in cameras. But he was a reactionary individual. It’s not like it was unprompted. Coming from a troubled background, a really challenging background, you’ve got this person who can smile, who made social commentary. I implore you to just look at this dichotomy and look at the things that pressured him into changing.

  CORMEGA Some artists are great because they’ve worked hard. Some artists have longevity. Some artists have appeal because of their image. Some artists have appeal because of their skill. Another thing that sells, as we know, is controversy. And then you have artists that touch people emotionally.

  When I think of rappers, there is no rapper that I could think of that was more emotional than Tupac. When I think of controversial rappers, there’s nobody that’s more controversial than Tupac. When I think about sex appeal, I’ve never seen love like Tupac—he had pop stars visiting him in jail. When I think about his versatility as an artist and his work ethic… he’s been dead for so long, but there’s still unreleased music floating out there, and the same guy who made “Hit ’Em Up” made “Keep Ya Head Up.” To go from “Dear Mama” to “Hail Mary” is amazing.

  Speaking from an artist’s perspective, there are some rappers that are battle rappers. So if you battle them as an emcee, you will lose, but they don’t know how to make good records. Some people know how to make good records, but they’re not battle rappers. There are some people that know how to make good songs, but they don’t know how to perform.

  Pac could do it all. Even when you think of some of the best interviews in rap, you’ve gotta throw Pac’s name in there. I could watch a Tupac interview right now for an hour and won’t be bored. Me, being that I traveled all over, I’m privy to this: I’m seeing Tupac murals in Africa. I’m seeing the love that he gets when I’m in Russia, when I’m in England. No one gets as much love all over the world.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD He was the happiest, most jovial dancer in the world.

  CHUCK WALKER He is the perfect hero, because he represented different things for different people. For the indigenous people, he was a radical who took up arms and defended them. For more moderate groups, he was a rebel forced to fight and he didn’t want to; he was a very religious man who said, “Don’t touch the Catholic Church.” He entered this form of incredible martyrdom. Just like any hero, there are lots of different interpretations.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE NATURE of oral history is to probe the collective memory. In the classical sense, it is a discipline of preservation—making sure knowledge stored only in the mind isn’t lost to time. Tupac Shakur is an interesting subject for such a practice. So much about his legacy has already been preserved. Yet, on some level, he remains an enigma.

  In the traditional academic oral history, the primary purpose is to chronicle, for the sake of shared truth and posterity. The idea is that a number of overlapping perspectives can create a more complete picture. As an oral history, Changes does seek to chronicle the life of Tupac Shakur, but in no way does it seek to be a completist work. Pac is among our most well-studied figures—there is already an authoritative documentary (Tupac: Resurrection), a sharp critical evaluation (Holler If You Hear Me), an exhaustive record of his life and career (compiled by Vibe), and a biopic (2017’s All Eyez on Me). There are forums, and fan sites, and podcasts. Instead, this oral history had greater interest in uncovering the man beneath the myth. It is a retrospective examination of influence. It quickly became a balancing act: Where to provide insight versus where to provide clarity? When should one person recount personal experience and when should a group rehash a public spectacle?

  Many of the key participants in this story are already dead. Many who are still alive hold their memories too close to share. Some are wary of how Tupac has been portrayed in the past; others have simply said all they have to say in the twenty-five years since his death. Some are saving their stories for books they hope to someday write themselves.

  My editor and I made several choices early on: that we would only include original interviews, save for the occasional explanatory footnote; that we would not exhume quotes from the dead (again, except in a few cases to p
rovide context); and that we would let the characters themselves, their interplay and even their occasional contradictions, build out the oral history’s narrative arc. Furthermore, I decided to focus particularly on those who hadn’t spoken as much or could provide a rarely heard perspective. I hoped that a wide-ranging cast of characters, with differing relationships to Tupac and his work, might highlight so many aspects of his personhood that we might begin to understand him better. This is a book that yearns to provide a new frame of reference. Perhaps by seeing him through the eyes of those who knew and studied him, we might get a truer sense of who he was and how he became the paragon for so many things.

  This oral history is less about all-inclusive, full-scale documentation and more about texture—about getting to the heart of what Tupac meant to people, how his life came to reflect so many different truths. I wanted to explore the many ways people saw him and how these approximations of the man came to make up a holistic depiction; how little gestures and individual stories build up over time to shape a life’s arc and impact.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANK YOU, first and foremost, to everyone who participated in this project. Thank you, Sean Manning, for being there with me every step of the way and helping me see this thing through. Thank you, William LoTurco, for your support and guidance. Thank you to my mother for the endless encouragement; to my father for all the nudges back onto the path; to my aunt for the enthusiasm. Thank you to my brothers, Charles and Kristian, and my sister, Danielle; everything I do, I do with them in mind. Thanks to E, and James, and Stephen, my sounding boards. Finally, thank you to Tupac Shakur, for all that he showed us.