Artist Spotlight: Tupac Shakur

Today is Pac’s birthday…he would have been be 37 years old. I sit and think of where he would be now and I smile. For even through the all the mess, he was still brilliant and a true Hip-Hop legend. There will never be another like him, and so I decided to re-run the Artist Spotlight I did on him back in April (Bey can wait until next week)…R.I.P. Pac…you will never die here…

If you have read this blog, you know that I love Tupac. His inconsistencies, his conflicted soul, his day and night personality…all contribute to what was so magnetic about him. Tupac was and always will be one of the best poets in the game to me…he didn’t necessarily have the best flow or the best voice, and his demons eventually caught up with him, but if you listened closely, he had the heart of a lion, and the will of a soldier.

video credit: originally uploaded to YouTube on February 12, 2006 by bgjoker

This whole Tupac/Biggie feud? Of course, I was on the Tupac side. I never even listened to a Biggie song, other than what was played on the radio, until after his death. It was only then that I realized that this whole “East Coast/West Coast” thing was immature and thought up by a bunch of thugs who had nothing better to do than bring violence into music, where it doesn’t belong.

Tupac was not only a talented Hip-Hop artist…he took the acting world by storm with his unprecedented and downright frighteningly real performance as Bishop in “Juice.” Here is my favorite scene:

video credit: originally uploaded to YouTube on March 28, 2008 by khashayar1985

One of the reasons that I love Tupac is because he reminded me of my brother. He was young, sometimes dumb, and always reactive to the situations around him. But I loved him because when he spoke, he tugged at my heart, because I just wanted to talk to him to see if I could fix him. I wanted tell him that maybe the world wasn’t always against him, and that maybe he didn’t have to be so angry all the time. But life had shown Pac the hard road; his anger and bitterness had torn him up so bad that no amount of talk or teaching could repair it. But I always saw him as ultimately good; underneath all the bullshit and the facade he presented, I felt that his heart was mostly okay.

This is the song that will forever keep me a fan of his…

video credit: originally uploaded to YouTube on February 12, 2006 by bgjoker

I still listen to Pac’s earlier stuff…it means the most to me, it is the truest to me…it represents to me Pac untainted. If ever there was such a thing…