Tupac’s Private Protest (Unreleased)
While discussing yesterday’s Tupac post with my co-worker Trish Deitch, it emerged that she had actually interviewed Shakur in the early nineties. As he was alive for a relatively short time, this news felt like more than water-cooler chat. So below is a description of her encounter with Tupac, in her own words.
I was writing a piece on John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice,” in L.A. Tupac and I were sitting at a picnic table in the middle of a large green field (Janet Jackson was in view down the way, getting her hair worked on, and Maya Angelou), and I asked him a question about Singleton, and he said something like, “Wait—let me do this.” Then he picked up my tape recorder, which was between us on the table, and he said something like, “I can do this better if I just say what I have to say.”
I was startled, but it made sense: Tupac was used to speaking his mind into a microphone. And, anyway, I’d spent a large part of that day being talked down to by people who thought I was clueless because I was white (Singleton himself said to me, “You’ll never understand my experience because you’re not black,” to which I’d replied, testily, “I may not be black, but I’m a woman,” to which he’d replied, “I like you”), and it had left me feeling a little enervated.
Tupac talked about (and I can’t quote this, because I didn’t keep the tape) how he probably wouldn’t make it past his twenty-first birthday. He said that many or most young black men don’t, where he came from. Then he said that until the time that young black men all had the opportunities that he had, he was going to refrain from doing what they couldn’t do. The example I remember him giving was flying: he said he wouldn’t fly first-class until all black men under the age of twenty-one could fly first-class.
It was a little personal protest. I just sat and listened. When he was done, he handed me my tape recorder and didn’t say anything else.
Later, in the car on the way off the set, I saw Tupac walking along the road alone. He was on a cell phone, talking animatedly. Not all that many people had cell phones back then. But hey.
While discussing yesterday’s Tupac post with my co-worker Trish Deitch, it emerged that she had actually interviewed Shakur in the early nineties. As he was alive for a relatively short time, this news felt like more than water-cooler chat. So below is a description of her encounter with Tupac, in her own words.
I was writing a piece on John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice,” in L.A. Tupac and I were sitting at a picnic table in the middle of a large green field (Janet Jackson was in view down the way, getting her hair worked on, and Maya Angelou), and I asked him a question about Singleton, and he said something like, “Wait—let me do this.” Then he picked up my tape recorder, which was between us on the table, and he said something like, “I can do this better if I just say what I have to say.”
I was startled, but it made sense: Tupac was used to speaking his mind into a microphone. And, anyway, I’d spent a large part of that day being talked down to by people who thought I was clueless because I was white (Singleton himself said to me, “You’ll never understand my experience because you’re not black,” to which I’d replied, testily, “I may not be black, but I’m a woman,” to which he’d replied, “I like you”), and it had left me feeling a little enervated.
Tupac talked about (and I can’t quote this, because I didn’t keep the tape) how he probably wouldn’t make it past his twenty-first birthday. He said that many or most young black men don’t, where he came from. Then he said that until the time that young black men all had the opportunities that he had, he was going to refrain from doing what they couldn’t do. The example I remember him giving was flying: he said he wouldn’t fly first-class until all black men under the age of twenty-one could fly first-class.
It was a little personal protest. I just sat and listened. When he was done, he handed me my tape recorder and didn’t say anything else.
Later, in the car on the way off the set, I saw Tupac walking along the road alone. He was on a cell phone, talking animatedly. Not all that many people had cell phones back then. But hey.
