“He’s a New York-born, Baltimore-raised, Black Panther-informed West Coast artist,” writer Jeff Pearlman says of rapper Tupac Shakur. “He’s a mishmash of a million different things.”Raymond Boyd/Getty
It’s impossible to overstate rapper Tupac Shakur’s influence on music and culture in the 1990s. One of the era’s bestselling musical artists, Tupac helped define West Coast hip-hop through vulnerable, introspective lyrics and Black power politics. His death in 1996 at just 25 years old sparked conspiracy theories for decades and left his fans wondering what might’ve been.
By his own admission, sports writer Jeff Pearlman is not the rapper’s likeliest biographer. Pearlman typically profiles athletes like Barry Bonds or Brett Favre. But as he waited for what he called “the big, fat biography” of Tupac, his impatience and long-standing fascination with the rapper got the best of him. So he set out to write it himself.
“Tupac Shakur…was profoundly smart and in many ways incredibly enlightened, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have his 12th Academy Award now,” Pearlman tells More To The Story host Al Letson, adding that both Tupac’s music and movies still resonate because they were a compelling combination of hip-hop and Black Panther.
On this week’s episode, Pearlman talks about his book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur; discusses how Tupac’s Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur, shaped her son; and examines the nuance and mystery surrounding Tupac’s life and death almost 30 years later.
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