On the 20th anniversary of Tupac Shakur’s death, NPR touted the rapper, who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting, for his “pro-feminist,” “pro-choice” music. Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne talked to journalist Kevin Powell about Tupac. Powell recommended "Keep Ya Head Up," praising, “Here's a song that is really an ode to women. It's a pro-feminist song. He talks about being pro-choice in the song. He talks about being anti-street harassment in the song.”
Montagne eventually noted, “There are also songs that are really violent and demean women and speak about his early death and speak about killing police.” The discussion also turned to Tupac’s Black Panther mother, Afeni:
KEVIN POWELL: She raised Tupac as a single mother. She was literally in prison for her political activities in 1971. And just the month before Tupac was born, she was finally released, and he was literally born in the midst of all the upheaval in our country at that time. And she's such an important figure. She helped to shape his political consciousness.
A partial transcript is below:
RENEE MONTAGNE: Pick out one of his many hits that we can, you know, listen to for a few minutes and really catch what you're saying there.
POWELL: Well, I would recommend "Keep Ya Head Up." Here's a song that is really an ode to women. It's a pro-feminist song. He talks about being pro-choice in the song. He talks about being anti-street harassment in the song, but he also - it's an autobiographical song about being a young black male growing up in inner-city America. And that was Pac's uniqueness, his ability to weave in different scenarios and to paint this full picture of a community over and over again.
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MONTAGNE: ...Which, you know, was about the woman who absolutely formed him - strong lady, Black Panther as a young woman, crack addict as an older person.
POWELL: That is accurate. I mean, Afeni Shakur is who you're talking about who just died earlier this year at sadly in her late 60s of a heart attack. But she raised Tupac as a single mother. She was literally in prison for her political activities in 1971. And just the month before Tupac was born, she was finally released, and he was literally born in the midst of all the upheaval in our country at that time. And she's such an important figure. She helped to shape his political consciousness.
But also there's the dynamic of the - of their separation and moving about because she became addicted to crack cocaine, as you mentioned. You know, that was a turning point in Pac's life, and so he was out there trying to find his way as a young man without a father figure, you know, and it was difficult. And he talks about that in his music.
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MONTAGNE: There are also songs that are really violent and demean women and speak about his early death and speak about killing police.
POWELL: Absolutely. In a lot of ways, you know, Pac was no different than what we heard in the blues, jazz music, rock 'n' roll that came before because all those music forms also talked about violence, was disrespectful to women. And so Pac was actually very much in that tradition, unfortunately, of us who are men in this society who have been socialized through patriarchy, through misogyny, through sexism. And he grappled with that because again you could hear in "Keep Ya Head Up" him talking about being a supporter of women, but then you turn to a song like "Hit 'Em Up" and he's talking about being violent towards his rivals and having sex with one of his rivals wives. It was very disrespectful, but it represented the contradictions that many of us as men face in this society.
And what's different about Tupac is that he spoke very openly and honestly about it, not just in his music but in his conversations with people, you know, what he was trying to grapple with and trying to figure out. For example, when he was charged with that sexual assault case in New York City back in the '90s, one of the things he said to me in the famous prison interview from Rikers Island is that he takes responsibility for not stopping those men, his so-called friends, from doing what they did to that young lady and that he was guilty of that. What man do we know that at 23 years of age would actually say something like that? And so I really believe that had Pac lived he would have turned some corners in his life around these different issues that dogged him.
