When did he die again? And why the hell should I care?
Well, first off, all the societal problems he was trying to fix still exist, which is not really his fault since they're massive problems and he died a scant few years into his very difficult life. Second, he has released more albums in death then he had in life, and with an incredible amount left to be released, he still clearly has stuff to say even 10 years later.
I think the greatest and most underrated value of Tupac was his ability to force us to re-evaluate our first principles, or the assumptions which we have about the world that dictate our actions. Most people will default to those to blend-in, survive, and thrive, figuring the world works a certain way they must adhere to and denying their own ability to change it. Winston Churchill famously said "If you're age 20 and you're a conservative you have no heart, and if you're age 50 and you're a socialist you have no brain." One of the problems with people is that when they are young and want to change the world they're not smart enough to figure out how, and when they're old enough to figure out how they no longer care. As with nearly all other aspects of life, most people realize their limits before they realize their potential.
Tupac saw how the world should be, and often acted like it in trying to change it. At age 17 he was wonderfully and purely idealistic, suggesting that poverty was the root of all his and many others' unhappiness, and for a better world "rich people should live like poor people, and poor like rich people, and they should change every week". This is a crazy idea, until you consider that in Cuba, Fidel Castro cancelled school for a year in 1961, sending the educated live with the illiterate masses, and today poor isolated communist Cuba has the highest literacy in the world. This shows how a solution like that, while impractical in a selfish democratic world, could actually work. Later, he continued to learn how big the problems were, how complex the solution would need to be, the difficulty in recruiting all those who need to be involved, and the huge odds against his success. He also had an intimate understanding of other victims of the struggle against black oppression, with his mother and many others who raised him former members of the Black Panther Party, and because of it, in the words of his stepfather Dr. Mutulu Shakur from prison, are all "either dead or in prison". Since the 1950's and J. Edgar Hoover's reign, the FBI has had a policy of discrediting (at the very least) any black leader who had the potential to lead the "black" ghetto's to rise up against the "white" suburbs, killing a few like George Brown and Fred Hampton, and as Nick Broomfield proved in his documentary "Biggie and Tupac", illegally performing surveillance on both Biggie Smalls and Tupac when they were killed, then fleeing the scene instead of helping catch the killers. To ignore all this is rational, the same as ignoring all other perpetual injustices, because the deeper you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, as a friend put it who has, "the worse it smells", and that can be a depressing fact.
However, to deny the value in looking into it is to validate giving up, accepting the world as it is, and then out of a self-indulgent guilt at one's own apathy, mocking anyone who tries hard to understand or change it. This is a dangerous cynicism, which if exported or adopted en masse will lead to a world full of horrible tragedies and inequities and rampant corruption. Oops. Here we are.
For anyone to try to change the world is admirable, and for Tupac to try knowing what happened to his Panther-kin before him took incredible balls. That also may have been a big reason why he prophesized his own death, among the many others. Dr. Mutulu Shakur said something happened with black revolutionaries in the 1970's: "they stopped making them", and Tupac was easily the most popular one at the time his death. His obsession with completing his mission before he died was all-consuming: most artists release one album a year, in the last months of his life after being bailed out of his unjust stay in prison, he was recording 3 to 7 songs a day. A lot of what he was speaking about amounted to the old proverb "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", timeless advice, and with the growing emphasis on drug rehabilitation programs instead of prison, heroin needle exchanges, hot-lunch and after-school youth programs, we are beginning to see more and more the sense in that.
Why should you care? Because if you did you would learn all this and much, much more about how the world crushes those who try to fight to change it for the better, and that's not a bad idea.
Well, first off, all the societal problems he was trying to fix still exist, which is not really his fault since they're massive problems and he died a scant few years into his very difficult life. Second, he has released more albums in death then he had in life, and with an incredible amount left to be released, he still clearly has stuff to say even 10 years later.
I think the greatest and most underrated value of Tupac was his ability to force us to re-evaluate our first principles, or the assumptions which we have about the world that dictate our actions. Most people will default to those to blend-in, survive, and thrive, figuring the world works a certain way they must adhere to and denying their own ability to change it. Winston Churchill famously said "If you're age 20 and you're a conservative you have no heart, and if you're age 50 and you're a socialist you have no brain." One of the problems with people is that when they are young and want to change the world they're not smart enough to figure out how, and when they're old enough to figure out how they no longer care. As with nearly all other aspects of life, most people realize their limits before they realize their potential.
Tupac saw how the world should be, and often acted like it in trying to change it. At age 17 he was wonderfully and purely idealistic, suggesting that poverty was the root of all his and many others' unhappiness, and for a better world "rich people should live like poor people, and poor like rich people, and they should change every week". This is a crazy idea, until you consider that in Cuba, Fidel Castro cancelled school for a year in 1961, sending the educated live with the illiterate masses, and today poor isolated communist Cuba has the highest literacy in the world. This shows how a solution like that, while impractical in a selfish democratic world, could actually work. Later, he continued to learn how big the problems were, how complex the solution would need to be, the difficulty in recruiting all those who need to be involved, and the huge odds against his success. He also had an intimate understanding of other victims of the struggle against black oppression, with his mother and many others who raised him former members of the Black Panther Party, and because of it, in the words of his stepfather Dr. Mutulu Shakur from prison, are all "either dead or in prison". Since the 1950's and J. Edgar Hoover's reign, the FBI has had a policy of discrediting (at the very least) any black leader who had the potential to lead the "black" ghetto's to rise up against the "white" suburbs, killing a few like George Brown and Fred Hampton, and as Nick Broomfield proved in his documentary "Biggie and Tupac", illegally performing surveillance on both Biggie Smalls and Tupac when they were killed, then fleeing the scene instead of helping catch the killers. To ignore all this is rational, the same as ignoring all other perpetual injustices, because the deeper you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, as a friend put it who has, "the worse it smells", and that can be a depressing fact.
However, to deny the value in looking into it is to validate giving up, accepting the world as it is, and then out of a self-indulgent guilt at one's own apathy, mocking anyone who tries hard to understand or change it. This is a dangerous cynicism, which if exported or adopted en masse will lead to a world full of horrible tragedies and inequities and rampant corruption. Oops. Here we are.
For anyone to try to change the world is admirable, and for Tupac to try knowing what happened to his Panther-kin before him took incredible balls. That also may have been a big reason why he prophesized his own death, among the many others. Dr. Mutulu Shakur said something happened with black revolutionaries in the 1970's: "they stopped making them", and Tupac was easily the most popular one at the time his death. His obsession with completing his mission before he died was all-consuming: most artists release one album a year, in the last months of his life after being bailed out of his unjust stay in prison, he was recording 3 to 7 songs a day. A lot of what he was speaking about amounted to the old proverb "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", timeless advice, and with the growing emphasis on drug rehabilitation programs instead of prison, heroin needle exchanges, hot-lunch and after-school youth programs, we are beginning to see more and more the sense in that.
Why should you care? Because if you did you would learn all this and much, much more about how the world crushes those who try to fight to change it for the better, and that's not a bad idea.
