Perhaps no other rapper has been dissected and discussed more than Tupac Shakur. Though he was only 25 years old when he died in September 1996 after being struck amid a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, he has lived on through posthumous albums, documentaries, and even college classes dedicated to his legacy. He also lives on through the memories of those who knew him.
Former Pitchfork contributor Sheldon Pearce captures many of those memories in his new oral history, Changes. The book covers Tupac’s entire life, from his days growing up as a child of the Black Panthers to his early acting experiences as a student at Baltimore School for the Arts through to his transformation into a chart-topping, gangsta-rap force and his tragic end. It features an eclectic array of voices, including close friends, journalists, scholars, studio engineers, detectives, and even a juror in the 1993 trial in which Tupac was found guilty of first-degree sexual abuse. Collectively, Pearce and his cast offer a portrait that shades in the traditional Tupac myth with context and complexity.
This month’s Pitchfork Book Club features an excerpt from Changes, where interviewees contemplate the question: What would Tupac have done if he had lived?
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Nahshon Anderson [former intern at Tupac’s film company Look Hear Creations]: 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 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 20 years ago and is still so relevant now, I can’t imagine what he wouldn’t have been doing.
Gobi Rahimi [videographer, Look Hear Creations cofounder]: 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 [actor, “Raheem” in Juice]: 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.
Kendrick Wells [friend and personal assistant]: 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 L.A. 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 [Bullet and Gridlock’d]. I think that was his next step.
Gobi Rahimi: I read the Live 2 Tell script Pac wrote [in prison, about a young man who escapes a troubled upbringing by becoming a ruthless drug dealer]. 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. At one point after he died, I had actually 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 [classmate at Baltimore School for the Arts in the late ’80s]: 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, the world would have seen some magic. Maybe he could have reinvented himself.
Richard Pilcher [retired principal acting teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts]: 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 [fashion designer]: 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.
Blu [Los Angeles rapper]: You can see his contribution to this life in his short 25 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 [acted with a 12-year-old Tupac in New York City’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble]: 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 [worked with Tupac in her role as the founder of the artist advocacy organization Rap Coalition]: 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. I definitely see Pac doing that, only not backing down. I can see him just crushing this kid.
Rob Marriott [former Source editor and Vibe writer]: 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 [The Undefeated staff writer]: 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 [African and African American studies department chair at Duke University]: There are these figures that have emerged historically over the last 50 or 60 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. 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 40 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 ’60s and ’70s—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. 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 Jay-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.
From CHANGES: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur by Sheldon Pearce. Copyright © 2021 by Sheldon Pearce. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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