Some are full of anger and rage, others convey hope and kindness. Some of them read like song lyrics, others feel like a mirror into his soul. I only found out later that Tupac also wrote poetry and was over the moon when I found this collection of his poems at a local bookstore - I regarded it as such a treasure that I took it with me everywhere I went for a while, and I still know a couple of the poems by heart.Įarlier this morning, when I saw on social media that today is the 24th anniversary of Tupac’s death, I picked it up again and began to take another close look at the poems. Only a couple of weeks before, we had sat together in his bedroom, listening to the album “Me Against The World” on a continuous loop. I was a teenager living in Tokyo back then and absolutely devastated when I heard the news because I had literally just been introduced to his music by my hip hop loving boyfriend, still deliciously oblivious about the East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry in the US. It was 24 years ago today that Tupac died of the gunshot wounds he had suffered six days earlier in the Las Vegas shooting. This poetry collection was published three years after his death by the Shakur Family Foundation and included never before seen poems, written in his own hand when he was a 19-year-old teenager.
Tupac was globally known as a hip hop artist, but perhaps lesser so as a poet. (…) The slaying silenced one of modern music’s most eloquent voices - a ghetto poet whose tales of urban alienation captivated young people of all races and backgrounds.” Pulitzer Prize-winning music journalist Chuck Philips wrote after his death: “ helped elevate rap from a crude street fad to a complex art form, setting the stage for the current global hip-hop phenomenon. Regarded by some as the most influential rapper of all times, Tupac Shakur’s life was tragically cut short in 1996, when he was shot four times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas.
A collection of poems by Tupac Shakur, or 2Pac, which was published a few years after his death.
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