King of Pain: 20 Years Later, Tupac Shakur’s Problematic Genius Still Haunts Us
Some excerpts:
The aphorism goes, “Stars are born, not made.” I understood this twice in childhood: the first time I saw Magic Johnson on television, and the moment in Digital Underground’s “Same Song” video when a resplendent Tupac Shakur burst into the public consciousness on a chariot, wearing a dashiki and kufi, and holding a scepter that looked like it was fashioned out of black cool itself:
Now I clown around when I hang around with the Underground
Girls who used to frown, say I’m down when I come around
Gas me and when they passed me they used to dis me
Harass me but now they ask me if they can kiss me …
When I rewatched the video last week, it struck me that the men carrying the chariot looked like pallbearers. Even in his figurative birth as a star, his inevitably early demise winked at us. The two always moved hand in hand.
Scientific American says a star is born when atoms of light elements are pressured significantly enough to undergo fusion. The same article notes all stars are the result of a balance of forces; that once fusion is achieved, stars exert an outward pressure. As long as the inward and outward forces are of equal intensity, the star remains stable.
Tupac epitomized fusion—cultural fusion—and maybe because of that, his star was never a stable one. The intensity of society he absorbed at every stop and the intensity he projected back at it were rarely in step.
He spent the first decade of his life in Harlem, the next four years in Baltimore, and came of age in Oakland, Calif., before his celebrity put him in a state of constant transience, living on the road, in Los Angeles, and in a jail cell. He was at once everyone and no one; as rich in spirit as he was, he was also spiritually homeless. That made him quintessentially black in America.
He was and remains a Jesus figure for so many black men not because of his Makaveli album-cover art, but because he let himself belong to us. His love, his pain, his anger, his intensity, his generosity, his recklessness, his paranoia, his vulnerability … He put it all on display.
He was as naked an artist as I have ever known. No one had offered such access to his life, and the more titillating episodes made us wonder if he hadn’t entered a self-perpetuating cycle—it was tough to tell whether the music was being driven by his life experiences or was driving them. To some, he was hip-hop’s great method actor; to many others, he was the realest.
His energy was frenetic, his enthusiasm infectious. I could never figure out if he was running from or running toward something, but I knew I was willing to follow him wherever the journey took him, and me. The journey, in Taoist fashion, turned out to be the destination. In retrospect, I wish he would have kept more of himself for himself. It’s not coincidental that he hasn’t even been allowed his own death.
Everything about Tupac belonged to us in the end. In a very figurative sense, he died for the sins of our society and our culture of celebrity worship, violence, crass materialism and black death.
All these years later, Tupac is whoever we decide he is. He still functions as a funhouse mirror, and whatever we project onto him comes back to us in a larger, stranger reflection. He was a prophet, a player, a thug, a poet, a Panther, a prince. He navigated Nate Parker’s path of sexual assault, but came out largely unscathed in terms of public perception. Most of us were always willing to give Tupac the benefit of the doubt, partially because he was handsome, irrepressible and charismatic, but mostly because he was a black man who loved himself because of his blackness rather than in spite of it.
King of Pain: 20 Years Later, Tupac Shakur’s Problematic Genius Still Haunts Us
Some excerpts:
The aphorism goes, “Stars are born, not made.” I understood this twice in childhood: the first time I saw Magic Johnson on television, and the moment in Digital Underground’s “Same Song” video when a resplendent Tupac Shakur burst into the public consciousness on a chariot, wearing a dashiki and kufi, and holding a scepter that looked like it was fashioned out of black cool itself:
Now I clown around when I hang around with the Underground
Girls who used to frown, say I’m down when I come around
Gas me and when they passed me they used to dis me
Harass me but now they ask me if they can kiss me …
When I rewatched the video last week, it struck me that the men carrying the chariot looked like pallbearers. Even in his figurative birth as a star, his inevitably early demise winked at us. The two always moved hand in hand.
Scientific American says a star is born when atoms of light elements are pressured significantly enough to undergo fusion. The same article notes all stars are the result of a balance of forces; that once fusion is achieved, stars exert an outward pressure. As long as the inward and outward forces are of equal intensity, the star remains stable.
Tupac epitomized fusion—cultural fusion—and maybe because of that, his star was never a stable one. The intensity of society he absorbed at every stop and the intensity he projected back at it were rarely in step.
He spent the first decade of his life in Harlem, the next four years in Baltimore, and came of age in Oakland, Calif., before his celebrity put him in a state of constant transience, living on the road, in Los Angeles, and in a jail cell. He was at once everyone and no one; as rich in spirit as he was, he was also spiritually homeless. That made him quintessentially black in America.
He was and remains a Jesus figure for so many black men not because of his Makaveli album-cover art, but because he let himself belong to us. His love, his pain, his anger, his intensity, his generosity, his recklessness, his paranoia, his vulnerability … He put it all on display.
He was as naked an artist as I have ever known. No one had offered such access to his life, and the more titillating episodes made us wonder if he hadn’t entered a self-perpetuating cycle—it was tough to tell whether the music was being driven by his life experiences or was driving them. To some, he was hip-hop’s great method actor; to many others, he was the realest.
His energy was frenetic, his enthusiasm infectious. I could never figure out if he was running from or running toward something, but I knew I was willing to follow him wherever the journey took him, and me. The journey, in Taoist fashion, turned out to be the destination. In retrospect, I wish he would have kept more of himself for himself. It’s not coincidental that he hasn’t even been allowed his own death.
Everything about Tupac belonged to us in the end. In a very figurative sense, he died for the sins of our society and our culture of celebrity worship, violence, crass materialism and black death.
All these years later, Tupac is whoever we decide he is. He still functions as a funhouse mirror, and whatever we project onto him comes back to us in a larger, stranger reflection. He was a prophet, a player, a thug, a poet, a Panther, a prince. He navigated Nate Parker’s path of sexual assault, but came out largely unscathed in terms of public perception. Most of us were always willing to give Tupac the benefit of the doubt, partially because he was handsome, irrepressible and charismatic, but mostly because he was a black man who loved himself because of his blackness rather than in spite of it.
King of Pain: 20 Years Later, Tupac Shakur’s Problematic Genius Still Haunts Us
