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| The late Tupac Shakur was often a misunderstood artiste consumed by his own chilling prophecies. |
His
name is synonymous with the tragedy that befell Gangsta rap and its subsequent
demise in the late 90s. Tupac Shakur has come to epitomize hope and resilience,
while at the same time being associated with the curse of a young black man in America.
His rise was meteoric and his fall an anticlimax to a troubled life blotted
with crime and incarceration.
Arguably
the crowning achievement of Gangsta rap, Tupac is best remembered as a young
man who became disillusioned by his own success that ultimately became his waterloo.
An extremely gifted wordsmith, his prowess at a recording booth remains
legendary. In fact, hate it or love it, we are yet to see anything like it. The songs he recorded two decades ago remain
evergreen and relevant to date.
It
has been said that success killed Tupac—it made him develop a false sense of invincibility
that led to a fatal disregard for personal safety. Whether that is true or not
is not for me to decide. But what I do know is that this was a young disturbed
man whose life mirrored millions of other black youths’ in America. His single mother
battled a terrible crack addiction and missed out on many of his formative years.
This was a man who left home to live on his own in an abandoned building.
To
borrow the words of Jada Pinkett (now actor Will Smith’s wife) who briefly
dated Tupac, “nobody knew the demons Tupac carried . . . .’’ Deeply hurt beyond
point of recovery, he opted to channel out his pain through
his poetry and a familiar baritone that defined his music. Having pulled
himself up by his own bootstraps from the poverty infested neighborhoods of
California, here is a man who couldn’t break free from the senseless black on
black violence whose allure proved completely irresistible.
The
circumstances surrounding his unsolved murder in Las Vegas remain a chilling
reminder of the fact that the good die young. There is so much to learn from this fallen star. . . .
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