Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
“You think the Bay gon’ let you disrespect Pac?”
Kendrick Lamar, the most critically and commercially successful rapper in the world right now, delivered this line to a sold out baseball stadium in San Francisco. The roar that came in response made it clear that the crowd spanning “Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down” was fully with him in defending Tupac’s legacy against insolent misinterpretation.
Kendrick has long made explicit the influence Tupac has had on his work, and “Not Like Us,” the diss track smash he used to obliterate Drake last year, was modeled after his idol’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” arguably the greatest of the form. He evoked Pac’s name across the song, in the other shots he fired at Drake over the past year, and throughout his career – famously nearly titling his 2015 opus To Pimp a Caterpillar as a way of spelling out “2Pac,” and ending that album with an imaginary conversation spliced between them.
The rave reception Kendrick has received for following the principles laid out by the West Coast icon – from channeling his political consciousness through G-funk jams to leaving no patch of earth unscorched in his approach to rap beefs – speaks to our culture’s continued appetite for the legacy that Tupac Amaru Shakur left behind. His discography, rapidly accumulated and widely praised in his brief 25 years of life, still lives on in the culture, from the stateside anthem “California Love” to the continued popularity of hip-hop’s first double album and defining gangsta rap opus, All Eyez On Me.
Yet it’s Pac’s revolutionary-minded on-mic ethos that might have left a bigger footprint in the decades since his death. That’s the case effectively laid out by music journalist (and beloved POW contributor) Dean Van Nguyen in his new book Words For My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur. The work comes at a crucial time, where Tupac’s messaging and iconography is in greater conversation than ever before with both our musical and political moment.
As the author explained to me over Zoom from his home in Dublin, the strength of the connection animated his decision to tell this story. “How did this rap artist – this guy who made music that can still go off in the club – reach this global recognition as a revolutionary figure?” Van Nguyen asked. “It’s evident when you go to places around the world that are engaged or have history in anti-colonialist struggle, that he is particularly known and recognized.”
Dean cites conflicts in the Solomon Islands, Libya, and Sierra Leone in which Tupac’s verbal and visual language shaped the spirit of uprising, and traces those movements on through to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Even this month, as the demonstrations against ICE raged on in Los Angeles, 2Pac’s lyrics made the rounds on social media to express solidarity with the groups being targeted by this administration.
But the book goes beyond Tupac’s posthumous influence by looking backwards on the forces that informed his own political sensibilities: the rise of revolutionary groups like the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.
“It came from that starting point through to the movements that they preceded. I saw that Tupac was almost the midpoint to those things,” Dean explained. “So in telling his life story, there was this opportunity to go into some 50 years of radical American history.”
The result brings to the surface stories of resistance to state-sanctioned racism that have come to be buried with time. Those anecdotes are not just engrossing – the action includes prison breaks, courtroom drama, and Brink’s truck robberies – but have current resonance when white nationalist sentiments are back in the mainstream at a level that makes it seem like we haven’t made any progress since the civil rights era.
We also get a richer picture of some of the more enduring memories from that time that have gradually grown rigid in our collective consciousness. “As the years have passed the Panthers image has been reduced in terms of just black leather, guns, hard hitting protest,” Dean said. “What’s sometimes forgotten now is that the Panthers were this Marxist-Leninist intellectual movement. Huey Newton was a very daring political thinker of his time. It was important to delve more deeply into those roots than I’d seen before.”
Telling that story meant centering the first several chapters of the book not on Tupac, but his mother Afeni, often considered “the most famous mother in hip-hop,” but who lived a literature-worthy life of her own preceding the birth of Tupac. In one of the book’s most gripping sections, Dean walks you through Afeni successfully defending herself in the trial of the Panther 21 while pregnant with Tupac. The poetic symbolism of that event would almost be too obvious for fiction, and yet it’s one of several Afeni anecdotes that emotionally mirror the person Tupac would become, from her natural leadership in the Panthers to her relationships with fellow dissidents.
“She was an extraordinary woman before she ever became a mother, so it was nice to tell her story because it is interesting in itself,” Dean said. “But it’s also important to the telling of Tupac as a political figure, as a political thinker or as a kind of revolutionary icon, because this was the woman that shaped him and shaped that mindset.”
Through the lens of Affeni’s early life, you get a window into how the philosophies of the Black Panther Party developed, something Dean is able to better convey through his depth of reporting and interviews with figures who played key roles in the Party’s political activities. Many of those individuals were remarkably forthcoming with their roles in illicit but admirable efforts, offering an uncompromised portrait of the period by those manifesting the history in real time.
“One of the great joys of doing the book was speaking to that generation of activists and just getting their stories,” Dean shared. “I found that at this stage of their life, they’ve come to an acceptance that they’re not going to get in trouble for saying things anymore. I think a lot of them are motivated at this point to get as much of their stories down on the record as they can.”
Looking around the present offers little evidence for optimism, but going back in time and tracking the era’s activists led Dean to surprising sources of hope: “There are certainly ex-Panthers who shifted rightward and whose ideologies completely changed as they got older. But a lot of the ones who are still quite publicly visible and that I spoke to were all still dedicated to the core values of that movement. They still believe that what they fought for in the late sixties, early seventies is going to arrive. It’s very inspiring considering what they lived through and the amount of government suppression they faced – how they’ve watched some of their friends and comrades be imprisoned for decades, and now they are living through this new dangerous form of reactionary politics in Trumpism.”
The ideals of the Panthers still resonate with social justice efforts and this administration’s draconian response today, and going through their successes in Words For My Comrades is a reminder that the moral arc of the universe does occasionally reach its destination. However, Dean, to his credit, doesn’t hold up a rose-tinted lens over the time period either. The movement is portrayed in both its best and worst movements, as is Tupac himself.
“I didn’t want to just feed peoples’ pre-existing ideas about Tupac. If I was writing about him as an icon, I didn’t want it to be a hagiographic vision of why this guy was like a great man, you know?” Dean said. “It was always the hope that I’m going to challenge people’s perceptions of him in that way.”
Tupac, for all the ways he has been lionized as a revolutionary, was also a flawed figure practicing contradictions from what he preached. For songs as progressively feminist and empathetic as “Keep Ya Head Up” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” you have to contend with his arrest for allegedly sexually assaulting Ayanna Jackson in 1993. You also have to watch as his community-minded ideals, while always condoning justice-oriented uses of violence, become increasingly belligerent and hostile – an often-reckless aggression that bled dangerously into his extra-musical activities.
Dean doesn’t shy away from complicating the normative and romanticized read of Tupac’s legacy. The result makes the rapper a more useful figure to contend with today, at a moment when we are finally admitting that virtue signalling does not equate to actual virtue. The story also inevitably broaches questions around the value of violence in pushing back against state-sanctioned oppression.
“The book was not seeking to answer these broad questions on the moral legitimacy of violence in revolutionary activities, but I think that it is something that is at the heart of it,” Dean admitted. “I come from a country that has a long history of anti-colonial violence through the 20th century, and in many ways the conversation of what counted as resistance and what qualified as terrorism – that conversation has never really been resolved.”
Words For My Comrades won’t settle any debates, but it does the admirable task of deepening the perceptions of figures that history has come to flatten, from the Black Panther co-founders Bobby Steele and Huey Newton to the titular hero. Dean himself walked away with a new empathy for the man behind the myth.
“In spending three years thinking about this person every day, I found myself feeling quite a bit of affection for the childhood Tupac,” Dean shared. “There’s the famous video of him when he is in high school in California – he’s this big eyed, beaming, luminous kid, and I felt real affection for that person. It casts the rest of his life under a new sadness for me, because obviously it’s not ultimately a happy story.”
For myself, I walked away from Words For My Comrades with a more nuanced sense of Tupac’s politics, an appreciation for the depth of how he conveyed those politics through his art and actions, and a clearer visibility of how he continues to live and breath in our culture three decades since he was killed.
I finished reading the book right before that Kendrick concert, which led me to revisit for the first time in a decade the final studio album Pac recorded in his lifetime under the alias Makaveli. I heard in the LP’s paranoia-driven and world domination-minded lashing out a predecessor to what Kendrick accomplished this past year through GNX. That album followed Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, the double-LP where Kendrick – having earned universal, near-messianic goodwill – sought to deflect those projections and manufacture a similar messiness as his hero.
As you continue digging further back, you can trace 2Pac connections throughout Kendrick’s career moves. Yet the hyperaware, studied approach to replicate one of the most singular stories in hip-hop history ultimately proves how impossible it is for anyone to truly rise to be the heir to Tupac.
“It’s funny because once you grasp that Kendrick is 37, and over the trajectory of his career he’s only now getting around to doing his “Hit ‘Em Up”, you realize Tupac fit so much into such a short life,” Dean reasoned. “It’s just such an extreme existence.” The enormity of what 2Pac packed into his quarter century has by now cast a shadow longer than his own time on Earth, and books like Words For My Comrades remind us that the ripple effects are still nowhere close to subsiding.
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