Back in high school, in the mid-nineties, the white girls were very into the British boy band, Take That. The black girls into US Rapper Tupac Shakur. The contrast between the two sets of teens, in pretty much every sense, could not have been starker. On 13 February 1996, Take That announced that they were disbanding. White girls: distraught. Black girls: tickled pink. How we laughed at their OTT despair, their cacophonous wailing, their futile attempts to dial UK-based help lines, their insistence on wearing mournful all-white instead of regulation bottle green. “Drama Queens”, we called them. It was pretty satisfying.

Exactly 7 months later, on September 13, Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds. Hello, Shoe? Other foot, please. I remember pleading with my mom to let me stay home from school for a few days. So bloodshot were my eyes and acute my distress.

But this blog entry is not about teenage melodrama, racial division or how spiteful young girls can be. I’m listening to Tupac Shakur right now while working on a project. And I feel the same way now that I did 13 years ago. (Minus the hysterical hero-worship.) He might be rapping about hustling, Hennessy and ho’s, but I get it. Somehow, despite the utter dichotomy of our life experiences, I get it.

See, the problem with putting someone into box that says “Gangsta Rapper” is that it you have to add labels like “misogynist”, “ex-felon” and “gratuitously vulgar reprobate”. And once you do that, you don’t see anything else or hear anything else in the music. Yet, just as easily Tupac, could’ve been “social commentator”, “poet”, “powerful orator”. He was the man who said:

We wouldn’t ask a rose that grew from the concrete why it had damaged petals. We would celebrate its tenacity, we would all love its will to reach the sun. Well, we are the roses, this is the concrete and these are my damaged petals. Don’t ask me why, thank God, and ask me how.

The incongruity of that, the hardened, gun-toting rapper comparing himself to a delicate flower, is startling. Who doesn’t love an underdog? A misunderstood struggler. A fragile blossom trying to sprout up from among the overbearing weeds. Who doesn’t love that?

Of course he did say some pretty horrific stuff about people with sickle cell disease and threaten to gun down a whole boatload of people but….but…If you strip away the vulgarity, the f**k you’s and the die b**ch, die’s and just listen: He makes a lot of sense. A lot of angry, vulnerable, insightful, surviving, indomitable sense.

I miss music like that. I miss lyrical authenticity like that. Where’s the gut-wrenching vulnerability in music now? Where did true artistry go? Oh, wait, here it is.

artistry, poetry, Tupac, words