Twas 14 years ago today that Tupac died. I won’t be planting a tree or anything, but this is a huge day to other people. Oh, I get it. After all, I’m not blind. Just look at how striking the man was just by living.

For better or worse, you just couldn’t take your eyes off him. He was clearly bright, had that uncommon ability to make people feel better about themselves simply by smiling at them, and — not coincidentally — could rap his ass off. No, he wasn’t hitting you with mindblowing metaphors or anything like that. You might not leave a 2Pac record remembering any line he spit.
But I bet you remembered how you felt. Hip hop is notoriously provocative, but nobody did evocative like Pac did. This wasn’t about how dope he was or anything like that. Tupac was the very first person to sell us on how authentic he was. It was like old Southern soul mixed with rap music, where the unavoidable passion of each line trumped pitch or any turn of a phrase. It was right there, raw, unvarnished, and unafraid of what you had to say about it.
Of course, that last part, as it usually was, seemed to be a defense mechanism. Anyone who spent that much time daring someone to challenge how real he was had to be just as afraid to find out what those assertions might not be true. It’s classic behavior of the insecure, of those with no idea what their role in this world is supposed to be.
And it’s there that I begin to revisit Tupac. I always dug his music, but wasn’t a fan of him post-release. He seemed ridiculous to me, hanging with gangsters and trying his best to fit in with them. I didn’t have much respect for the folks I knew in high school who did that, so I sure wasn’t about to be impressed by someone doing the same on television.
(Plus, he had beef with Biggie ‘nem, and that’s who I was listening to at the time, so…but that’s when I was 14-16.)
Tupac was 25 when he passed. When I was in high school, 25 meant grown. Now? Well, not so much. Grown enough to be penalized for your mistakes, certainly, but nowhere near the point where you actually know what you’re doing. Still young enough to legitimately argue you’re a work in progress, and too young to be written off. And certainly too young to die.
More than anything, 25 is too young to think you know what you’re supposed to be. I talk to 25 year-olds now and hear them talk about confusion and impatience about what they’re doing and why they’re not already doing what they think they’re supposed to.
Forget about specific stuff like that, though. At 25, I’m not even sure how you can tell who you are. That’s one of those ages that’s a fierce battleground for the war most of us fight: differentiating between who we are and who we want to be.
I’ve always had a clear idea of who I wanted to be. I had my parents and my brother, the perfect combination of pragmatism, character and cool. I can’t think of a quality I want to have that the three of them don’t have in spades. I’d love to be as brilliant and compassionate as my father, as cool and prepared for any hustle as my brother, or have the pure intentions of my mother. In reality, I fall short of all those things to varying degrees. But I think I’ve got a clear enough idea of who I am to be comfortable with what I need to work on and how to go from being the person I am to the person I want to be.
Looking back on Pac, it’s clear those are luxuries he didn’t have. My parents are the rocks that their children and scores of those born to others lean on. Tupac’s mom? She smoked crack.
Needless to say, figuring out who I was and wanted to be was a lot easier.
Check that “Changes” video. See all the ways Pac wanted us to see him. From album to album, it was like we were dealing with an entirely different person. The dude in the herringbone in the “I Get Around” video has little to do with the cat in the glasses circa “Me Against the World,” and that dude is almost totally forgotten by “All Eyez on Me.” And Makaveli? I don’t think he even knew who the hell that dude was.
But through all that confusion, and at the core of all his intertwined hypocrisies, was a mindblowing talent. He was the guy you had to hope could get it together, because there was so much good he could do if he ever did. The confusion that comes from talented while simultaneously feeling shut out from the places your gifts “should” take you leads folks into so many different directions, but few of them are positive. It’s hard to find your way without someone to help order your steps, whether it be someone close or just a role model you can make into whomever you want that person to be.
Imagine what Tupac could have become had he lived to be 39 (which he would be today). Think of how many can see themselves in his rage, wish they could be the man with that smile, or possess the uncanny ability to be heard, even though most would prefer to ignore the things that concern him. And if that man, admittedly from the gutter and somehow able to say he lived to see the other side of his childhood, could have lived long enough to figure out what his place was and how to make that place work.
I truly don’t know what that place would be. Maybe it would have been a destructive one, but that seems impossible. He always seemed more genuine talking about the revolution than he did out with Suge Knight. But when he died, I thought his place there was the one he would always occupy. And that place was pretty foolish.
But with any of us — especially that guy — he would have probably been in an entirely different space just one year later. It is that which makes Pac one of the most fascinating “what ifs.” And not because of his music. Because of him.
Think about this: Pac’s the one rapper we talk about without going song-for-song. We don’t go verse-for-verse. We talk about him in his totality and the passion he spit at all times, even if it was misguided. He was bigger and more significant than his music. He was his own blurry, jumbled message.
And he wasn’t even close to being finished.
But it’s a shame he hadn’t gotten it right. All we can really evaluate the man on is his work and what he said on Earth, and that’s nothing short of confusing. We can’t hail the highs and ignore the lows just because we like the guy. Sure, he was a product of this world, and I’m reluctant to judge those that came from a world so markedly dissimilar to the Huxtablish, suburban upbringing I had. Put Pac in my house and him in mine, and maybe I’m the one dead in Vegas. Dude played his hand as he did and, when it’s all done, all that matters is what you leave table with.
In this case, we leave with confusion.
Then again, so does pretty much everyone else, and that’s why so many can relate to Pac. I’d bet that a lot of the people whom Pac really resonated with would feel the way I do — on smaller scales — about albums like “Rumours” and “808’s and Heartbreaks” or dudes like Lou Reed and Kurt Cobain. If you don’t relate to them, consider yourself lucky. It ain’t no shit you really wanna know about anyhow.
Tupac was the bridge from the disillusionment of the disintegration of the grass roots civil rights movement and America’s economic explosion in the 1990’s, bearing the brunt of the cold ’80s in between. If that wasn’t enough to confuse a man, I don’t know what else would be.
Well, that didn’t just confuse one man. It confused a generation, and it continues to. For those men, Tupac is their spokesman. Not one anointed by the record label, or determined by corporate force. This was determined by his connection with a generation, and the power of that can’t be discounted, regardless of the man’s flaws.
After all, I doubt he wanted to be that guy any more than you want to be who you’ve become. Damn shame he didn’t have time to figure out where to go next.