June 16, 2011 – by Enaemaehkiw Túpac Keshena (From Editor of the amazing blog Speed of Dreams)
If he wasn’t stolen from us by an assassin’s bullet 15 years ago today would have been Tupac Amaru Shakur’s 40th birthday. While the rap world lines up to pay homage to one of the greatest MC and poets ever to walk this world the truth of Pac’s legacy is often lost in the mix with the vacuous garbage that now passes as mainstream rap. While he sure wasn’t perfect (no mortal ever is), making songs about “bitches” and the like, he was self-critical of it as much as he participated in it. Pac also used his short life to also lend his powerful voice to the conditions of the Afrikan nation and other oppressed peoples on the streets of the cracker empire.
Pac’s music and life is rooted in the material conditions of the Afrikan nation and it’s struggles for liberation, something which his family was deeply involved in. His godfather Geronimo Ji Jaga Prat, his stepfather Mutulu Shakur, his aunt and godmother Assata Shakur and his mother Afeni were all freedom fighters, veterans of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army and the white power state’s war on the Afrikan liberation movement.
At a Harvard organized symposium in 2003 State University of New York at Buffalo English professor Mark Anthony Neal gave a presentation called Thug Nigga Intellectual: Tupac as Celebrity Gramscian. In it he argued that Pac was an example of the “organic intellectual” expressing the concerns of a larger group described by Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci. He also argued that Pac’s status as a “walking contradiction” allowed him to “make being an intellectual accessible to ordinary people.”
This is why I celebrate Pac’s all too short life while other’s try make him the grandfather of today’s empty rap world, or, even worse, try to make him into a monster, a criminal, a threat to the people that he loved so much.
So happy birthday Pac, you were a real G till the day that you died.
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