Tupac ShakurEssay Preview: Tupac ShakurReport this essayTupac Shakur was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1971. He was born in the ghetto and his mother was Afeni Shakur. Afeni was a black panther. She had tried to have many children prior to the birth of Tupac but always had miscarriages. However, when Tupac was born, she knew something was special about him. She seemed to feel a different type of spirit in Tupac than anyone she had ever met. She raised Tupac up in a life filled with drugs, violence, and occasional homelessness. She was addicted to cocaine and lived a “rough” lifestyle. Tupac had to go through many different changes in his life moving to Baltimore and California before he finally found where he felt he belonged. As a child, Afeni would write poems for him and sang them to him. She said it was her way to warn him about things in life. She would put a meaning in the poems that she felt he could take with him in the later stages in life and use. This was the main inspiration of Tupac to search a career in music. All of these things may have prepared Tupac for the real world more than others had been prepared. He had lived through tragedy and addiction instead of some of the fairy tales that most kids live through and knew what their lasting affects were and how to face these situations. Tupac respected his mother highly and they shared a great bond.
While in Baltimore, Tupac attended The Baltimore School for the Performing Arts where he studied ballet and acting. His teachers thought of Tupac as a great and brilliant student and he left a lasting impression on his peers there. However, he wasnt able to stay in Baltimore and had to move to Oakland, California. Thats when, as described by Tupac, he began hanging with the wrong crowd. He joined a rap group in which he was a dancer and released his first album “2Pacalypse Now,” which became a big success. He eventually grew out of this group and moved on to Interscope Records where he was signed as a solo artist and really began his career.
Tupacs lyrics were so strong against the status quo and for resistance that the vice president even commented on his music saying that it had no place in their society. This made Tupac hungrier to keep producing music. In his songs, he would talk about things like police brutality, poverty, unemployment, insufficient education, Black on Black crime, teenage addiction, crack addiction, and many other things. He didnt just rap about these things and tell how they were bad though. He also told of how he felt society could take steps to fix the problems. He was not just another rapper mad at the world and spitting off their disgust without any step to changing it. What he truly wanted was to influence a change within society through his music. He wanted to be a revolutionary. However, it seemed like every time he got going something tried to slow him down. After making many different songs as tributes to the woman, he was accused later of raping a girl and went to jail for it. He felt disgusted by this charge. After showing how much he appreciates women through his music, he couldnt believe he would ever be accused of something like that. However, he felt that when someone is succeeding and the government doesnt like it, they will find a way to hold them back. They tried to hold Tupac back, but society wasnt very successful at doing so.
The song that Im going to discuss is “Dear Mama.” In this song, “Tupac describes with riveting clarity how his fathers absence affected his life” (Reed 153). The first verse talks about how he and his mom argued a lot. He talks about how she kicked him out of the house and he didnt want to see her anymore at that point. Then, he realized that nobody could take her place. He talks about how in school he stayed in trouble and did things that he knew he shouldnt do then he would go home dreading to see his mom because he knew she would discipline him. It also talks about how he was poorer than most kids. He says that he and his sister would cry together and that, even though they had different dads, they shared the same problems in life and wanted to blame them all on their mom. He also tells how he had to hug his mom from a jail
(4th Letter, 4th Sep 2007 at 16:01)
A little on the ‘nipple’ part: The lyric’s first paragraph starts “Why’s Mom?” or “Why’s Mama?” That’s the name given to the song in all the other musicals on the song’s lyrics, since it talks about the mother. It then plays the lyrics from the lyrics of “Daddy, Mama Is the New Normal” from “Cute”, from the original “Kiss Me Baby” and then plays the lyrics of “Cute, Kiss Me Baby”, from the original “Baby”, the same song, from the first song the next day, to make the song look like a song about his/her mom. It then plays the lyrics from the original “Kiss Me Baby”, from the original “Baby”, to make the song look like a song about his/her mom. It then plays the lyrics from the original “Kiss Me Baby”, to make the song look like a song about his/her mom. It then plays the lyrics from the original “Kiss Me Baby”, to make the song look like a song about his/her mom.
This is because after “Cute, Kiss Me Mama” , he finds himself singing that song again and again. He says it’s just an excerpt on the radio, then he sings a whole song about that “kiss mom” song again and again. And even the lyrics of that song, (to his mom). Also, his mom had been doing something wrong at school recently and he told her that she was the wrong kind of student for being a mom. (Reed 153. )
He later describes his mother as being a girl, so that’s all he had done. He also told her about the family, his father, his siblings, his two parents, his cousins, where to call for him. He even told her how to write his own songs. When he was 11, when he started studying in the middle of summer, he began working on his own songs and also on other projects.
For example, he told her about the fact that he and his cousins were on the playground in the first week of summer and there was no playground. He then sang all his parents songs. He then sang all his father songs. (Reed 153. )
He often described it as “My Mother Was a Girl Again”, and said he was glad everybody had changed and didn’t realize they were changing. “And my Mother was a Boy Again” also called that song.
He recalled his brother, who is a musician, saying he and his parents were playing the piano together and playing songs. He also told her that he loved her, even though she was a boy.
[The second verse and verse that he spoke about in that song also refers to the fact that he had been at his brother’s house looking at what he considered to be the bad habits of his father who often came in and talked to him. ] He says he and his mom worked hard, worked out together, got together late at night and were very