"Something touched me deep inside/ The day the music died."
Don McLean, "American Pie"
I was 13 years old when "Brenda's Got a Baby" dropped. His debut single wasn't a particularly significant song for the era. A lot of hip hop songs at the time spoke on social issues; but for some reason this one stood out. Maybe it was because we all knew someone like Brenda; maybe it was the stark black and white video; maybe it was the unique song structure (instead of the standard two or three 16-bar verses, he opts for the Slick Rick approach: the entire song is one long verse with a chorus sung at the end). Maybe it was something different for everyone who heard it. But regardless, while it wasn't the first time I had heard Tupac Shakur's voice, it was the first time I heard the voice of 2Pac.
I find it interesting how this song became an allegory for his life. Both the children of drug addicts, Brenda and Tupac naively wandered into the world of something that should be beautiful and pure; for Brenda it was sex, for 2Pac it was hip hop. They were both taken under the wing by someone of power who did not have their best interest in mind (Brenda's cousin and Suge Knight). And they both died as victims of their beautiful world being distorted into an ugly perversion of what it should be.
I was 18 the day the music died. Ten years ago today, Friday the 13th of September, 1996. It was the second week of my freshman year at Baylor. I had yet to learn how to navigate the vast nightlife of Waco so I was hanging out in the lobby of Penland, my dorm hall. I was sitting there with some other black freshman students. Someone had put the channel on BET but no one was really paying any attention. Until a news flash came on announcing that Tupac Shakur had succumbed to the gunshots wounds that had been inflicted upon him in Las Vegas. We all jumped up and watched the TV in disbelief. I recall thinking that when I heard 2Pac had been shot I never really believed that he would die. It seems blissfully ignorant in retrospect, but at the time deaths in hip hop were uncommon, and the violence that ensnared the culture for a time still didn't actually seem real to most fans. Up until this point the biggest shooting death in hip hop had occured nine years earlier when Scott LaRock of Boogie Down Productions was killed in the Bronx. But in that case hip hop had yet to grow into the worldwide phenomenon that it later became and BDP was still a relatively new crew. 2Pac's death was another matter entirely: he was arguably the biggest name in arguably the most influential musical genre on the planet. And he was dead at age 25.
Over the past decade I've heard countless times 2Pac referred to as the greatest emcee ever. I personally do not share that belief. At no point during his life did I ever think that he was among the best lyricists; he never had the dopest delivery or an amazing voice nor did he spit the most clever punchlines or most meaningful metaphors. In my opinion, that automatically eliminates him from the discussion. I don't think there was ever a point where he was my favorite rapper. Truth be told, I only own one 2Pac album and it's the only one that I would argue merits "near classic" discussions: Me Against the World. What I cannot deny that he had, however, is a presence. Perhaps he was limited in some aspects of emceeing, but he overcame them by taking what abilities he did have and somehow making them something greater than the sum of their parts. That is why he is still remembered today.
"What if" is one of the most often asked questions. We don't know how things would be if Tupac Shakur were still alive. In a recent article in Urb magazine, a scenario was created in which Shakur had survived the Las Vegas shootings. In this fictional account, 2Pac would have settled his beef with the Notorious B.I.G., quit rapping and become dedicated to social reform. Today he would be the mayor of Oakland. It's a nice thought. I don't know how realistic it is though. We have a tendancy to magnify our heroes in death, especially when they die young. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur...all of them loom larger in death than they did in life. As a matter of fact, over the past 3,652 days 2Pac has become the best selling artist in the history of hip hop. From a completely cynical standpoint, a young, tragic death is one of the best ways to market an entertainer. Indeed, there are plenty of conspiracy theories in existence that hold on to the belief that that is precisely why 2Pac was killed. Who knows what would have happened were he still alive. Personally, I think he would have fit in perfecty in the current atmosphere of hyphenated entertainers. In an era where all rappers want to become actors, Tupac Shakur would have made a seamless transition. Thanks in large part to his training at the Baltimore School for the Arts, he was much more well-rounded in various artforms than most of his would be contemporaries. He showed himself to be an excellent actor, especially in his very first role as the pychotic teenager Bishop in the film Juice. I can envision a world in which 2Pac places music in the background to focus on acting...a more street credible Will Smith.
Nevertheless, all the speculating and wishing in the world won't change the fact that he is dead. A mere five years after telling us how Brenda died, the author too was dead. In that time he went from being an unheralded backup dancer who showed us how to do the Humpty Dance to being the biggest casualty in a fictional war that his boss invented as a way to sell more records. And 'Pac is his name.
"One, two, three/ It's kind of dangerous to be an emcee/ They shot 2Pac and Biggie/ Hold your head when the beat drops."
Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, "Definition"
TITLE TAKEN
2Pac; "If I Die 2Nite"
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