Today is father's day.
I'm spending the day with my family as we reminisce on the funniest things my father has ever done, while he laughs and denies half of it. We plan to see a movie, listen to his favorite music, and enjoy some pretty awesome chinese take out --his treat.
While I'm celebrating my father, and fathers all across the globe, I'm also thinking of a man who never had the chance to be a father.
You see, today is also Tupac Shakur's birthday.
Known by his stage name 2Pac, he was born June 16th, 1971, in New york City. Raised by former Black Panther Afeni Shakur, he was moved constantly around the five boroughs, witnessing his mother's struggle with drug abuse. When the family moved to Baltimore, he went to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he cultivated his artistic craft. He joined the Digitial Underground in 1990, and one year later released his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now, which many call his most overtly political work.
He would release three more albums in his lifetime (the rest posthumously), sparking controversy for his persona that straddled between two sides. There was the hardened activist, unashamed and unapologetic for his honesty, holding his finger to cops, b****s/hoes, and all those who disrespect him. Then there was the other side, the softer side, a man reaching out to single mothers and brothers struggling to survive a system that kept trying to rush them in great numbers. There was a ring and yang within him that spoke the same message in two different ways. I'd like to think that, given the amount of fans he had and the amount of success he reached, enough people knew to reconcile the different dimensions to this one man, as they would the dimensions to themselves. Tupac was, for better or worse, unabashedly human.
It is not possible to remember Tupac without remembering just how human he was, and therefore susceptible to hardship. He seemed to be involved in all kinds of negative controversy. There was Don Quayle, the president, pulling his album because he blamed it for the death of a state trooper by a kid who was listening to it before the crime was committed. There were the arrest charges that peppered his life from 92 to 94, the most serious being an accusation of sexual assault on a woman by him and his entourage, which he fervently denied being any part of till his dying day.
There were also the shootings. Two in particular that changed everything.
The first was in 1994. Tupac was robbed, beaten, and shot by a group of men on his way to the Quad studios building, where Biggie happened to be at the time. It was this shooting that had sparked his rivalry with Biggie, whom he believed to be in knowledge of who the culprits were. After getting bailed out of jail by Suge Knight, he signed with Death Row records, bringing his beef with Biggie into his music with diss tracks. It was a rivalry between two rappers that was paired with a rivalry between their colleagues, Puffy and Suge Knight, which all spiraled into a rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap, a rivalry that never should have been and never had to be.
Many people credit that rivalry as the cause of the '96 car shooting in Las Vegas that took Tupac's life.
I don't know of the deeper details regarding who was responsible for what. That's not what I'm thinking of, here in the morning of Father's Day. I never knew the man personally, and I can only go off of what he left behind, in his interviews, his songs, and his actions. But I see the happier moments, the moments of black consciousness and compassion and humor, and I feel the loss. All the other issues aside, he was a young man with something meaningful to say to the world, and he did it with the power of the pen, and his voice lives on today for a reason--because it touches us to this day. I listen to him and I think of a brother with talent,skill, and heart whose life was cut short by unnecessary violence, brought on by the very internal animosity he spoke out against. It is eerie enough to think that at such a young age, he had been expecting it, penning a letter to his unborn son in a song released five years after his death.
Tupac Shakur would have been 42 years old today. He may have retired from music, he may have stayed. He may have been a mellower version of his younger version, or even more in your face. He may very well have been a father to the child he rapped to. But all chances to know for sure were cut off 17 years ago.
Today, I send my love to my father, the fathers alive, the fathers who have died, the single and married fathers, and the fathers who could have been.
Happy Birthday, Tupac. Rest In Peace.
-CDM
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