Tupac Shakur

Tupac 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 wasn't able to stay in Baltimore and had to move to Oakland, California. That's 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.

Tupac's 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 didn't 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 couldn't believe he would ever be accused of something like that. However, he felt that when someone is succeeding and the government doesn't like it, they will find a way to hold them back. They tried to hold Tupac back, but society wasn't very successful at doing so.

The song that I'm going to discuss is "Dear Mama." In this song, "Tupac describes with riveting clarity how his father's 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 didn't 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 shouldn't 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