Tupac Amaru Shakur: 1971-1996
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Book Reviews of Tupac Amaru Shakur: 1971-1996

Book Review: The Best Tupac Amaru "2pac" Shakur A.K.A. Makaveli Book
Summary: 5 Stars

Excrept:

Tupac Shakur: a fiery ferocious MC, an auspicious actor, a man so beautiful he made you wanna touch the screen, the photograph, him. He made you wanna see those vanilla teeth, the wet sweet wild eyes, the fleshy lips, the lashes like fans like feathers on his fudgy skin. He made you want to kill him, defend him, make him your baby. He dared you to find the lies, to prove he's crazy. Tupac keeps you searching, even now, for the line between him and the him he put out there for you to see, for the line between being and acting, between how one rolls through life and how one rocks the microphone. Crazy motherfucker. Coward. Sucker. Sexist. Sex symbol. Superman. Provocateur. Hero. He's another hero we don't need, and 'Pac's built, in death even, to last. From the start, his life was made-for-mythologizing, shrouded as it was in the tragedy of the Black Panther party. Because of his mother's affiliation with the group, Tupac's early existence was mingled with the plain logic of breakfast for everyone, in the ballsy resolve of guns in California's state capital, in the glamour and fraternity of leather pea-coats and tams for any brother wanting to stand up and fight--or look ferocious and fab. And Tupac's adult biography has everything--money, music, movies, malfeasance--that makes us love and hate someone. No matter what wrong shit he was ever caught up in, he always had his other raised-by-Panthers/fuck-tha-police self to fall back on. Tupac's five albums are equal parts striking and adequate. His dramatic (on-screen) performances were promising here and cartoony there. He never quite lived up to the brilliance of his Bishop in Ernest Dickerson's 1992 Juice. Onstage, his performances were spotty. Tupac, like many MCs, rode his own dick, seeming to care more about how he was coming off to his boys backstage than he did about the average Negro who paid to stand up in a hot club and catch 'Pac's fever for a moment. Tupac's different lives were very much in league, though; none would have been vibrant without the others. He managed them, like he managed his blackness--with a fantastic, desperate dexterity. Like most American heroes, Tupac Shakur had glide in his stride, big guns, and leather holsters. But his life was about juggling plums while bullets nipped at his ankles. It was about defiance, women, paranoia, ego, and anger--and going out in a blaze of what he imagined to be glory.   <Picture>n the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tupac Shakur was chiseling out an existence in Marin City, California's craggy slums. Oakland was known as Coke-Land back then, and though it was a bridge or two away from Marin, Tupac got over to the East Bay a lot, first hanging with his half brother Mocedes and a crew known as Strictly Dope, then with this white girl, Leila Steinberg, from Sonoma County, who was managing him, and then with the droll brothers who made up Digital Underground. To what degree it is true will probably go forever untold, but the rise of the Bay Area dope game and Bay Area hip hop were massively intertwined. (Actual gangsters, their stacks of cash, and the music business have been linked since kids in the 1940s gave music a real economy.) It's no coincidence that as the crack cocaine market exploded, people like DU, Too Short, and MC Hammer blew up--as well as lesser-known talents like MC Ant, Ant Banks, K-Cloud & the Crew, Premo, and Capitol Tax. The Oakland Police Department Drug Task Force was using battering rams to bust down the doors of dope <Picture>houses back then. Kids were getting a gross kind of paid while Highland Hospital yanked bullets from bodies. There seemed a ceaseless stream of mothers, groggy with grief, wailing on the news about a good child who was dead. MCs and songwriters responded to the havoc crack was wreaking on the East Bay. Hammer's contribution was the innocuous "Pray," but Tony Toni Toné went to the soul of the matter with 1988's "Little Walter," an ode to a dope dealer who gets shot upon opening his front door. Club Nouveau's 1986 "Situation #9" (a Top 10 R&B hit) was another admonition: "The life that you're living / Is gonna catch up to you / And boy, I think you need some help." The immense vocals balanced the paranoid lyrics, and that chemistry may have inspired Tupac to ask Roniece Livias to sing in the background (along with David Hollister, who would go on to sing lead in the first incarnation of Teddy Riley's BLACKstreet) of his debut single, 1991's "Brenda's Got a Baby." Tupac's "Brenda" deserts her newborn, sells dope, then sex, and ends up (in the video for the song) the silent star of a crime scene. He came to kick it with the DU crew one night on a plush Sausalito houseboat Jimi "Chopmaster J" Dright had rented while recording an album under the name Force One Network for Qwest Records. The bay rocked us softly while we listened to "Brenda's Got a Baby" three or four times. Tupac held on to a frayed piece of ruled paper with the lyrics. "No, she ain't somebody I know," he answered somebody's question. Tupac curled himself forward and laughed. "Y'all some simple muthafuckas," he said. "She's one a them girls we all know." He was 20, I think. The verse he rapped on DU's 1991 "Same Song" had been like a single french fry for a growing boy: "Now I clown around / When I hang around / With the Underground." Tupac felt he had more to say. His then-manager, Atron Gregory, was unable to convince Tommy Boy's Monica Lynch of Tupac's potential, but Interscope saw dollar signs in Tupac's worldview, and put up the dough so Tupac could have his say. It all came out of him in 2Pacalypse Now (1991), the words of a boy weary of doing the "Humpty Dance," and tired of standing on the corner in Marin City, selling weed. All the best songs on that album--"Young Black Male," "Rebel of the Underground," and the unwavering "Trapped," with Shock in the back murmuring "Nah / You can't keep the black man down"--are rank with the funk of a young man cooped up too long in somebody else's concept. 2Pacalypse didn't sound like a DU spin-off because while the Underground Railroad production squad stuck with the liquid bassiness that had succeeded for Digital, they also went for a sound more incensed, impassioned, broken, and hateful. They added some Tupac. Tupac's MC skills were just coming together back then. His words, especially in "Brenda," are over-enunciated and urgent. His writing, though, was clear and picturesque. Brenda was "in love with a molester / Who's sexing her crazy." And when Tupac says "Prostitute found slain / And Brenda's her name / She's got a baby," with Hollister and Roniece battling out in the background, moaning and repeating the name Brenda over and over, the song is bold and melancholy--a crystalline morality tale. The line "She didn't know what to throw away / And what to keep," especially in the way Tupac hurls it out, consonants sharp and hard, says more about a young woman's angry bewilderment with life than some of the most adored female MCs ever have. It was right before the release of 2Pacalypse Now that Tupac, while in New York with Digital Underground, went to an audition with Ronald "Money-B" Brooks. Mun read before Ernest Dickerson, but didn't get called back. Tupac, who said he went along "just to trip," ended up being cast opposite costar Omar Epps's tormented Q as Bishop in Juice. While the training Tupac received

Summary of Tupac Amaru Shakur: 1971-1996

Composers & Musicians Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Composers & Musicians
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