Literature
New book profiles slain rapper
By Steve Jones
USA Today
Five years ago this month, 25-year-old rapper Tupac Shakur died, a week after being gunned down in Las Vegas.
But rather than fading from sight, he has been transformed into a cultural icon, still a lightning rod for controversy. Millions of his seven (and counting) posthumous albums have been sold. The most recent — "Until the End of Time" — premiered at No. 1 in April.
Professor Michael Eric Dyson's "Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur" explores society's conflicted feelings toward an artist whose eloquent rage embodied the hope and the hopelessness of his generation.
He has been the subject of books and plays. Last month, ground was broken in Stone Mountain, Ga., for the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts. There are even those who refuse to believe he is dead.
In his book "Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur," DePaul University professor Michael Eric Dyson (Basic Civitas, hardback, $24) explores society's conflicted feelings toward an artist whose eloquent rage embodied the hope and the hopelessness of his generation.
Shakur, whose Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur, was pregnant with him in prison, was raised in poverty. He experienced hunger, homelessness and abandonment as his mother battled cocaine addiction. But she also instilled in him racial pride and revolutionary ideas. These would infuse much of his work, even as he embraced the thug life. Even after he achieved success, he never let go of his fierce identification with the underclass.
Though he never graduated from high school, Shakur was remarkably well read. He devoured classic novels, political treatises, feminist writings, African American literature and poetry, philosophy and history. His musical tastes were equally broad, ranging from Miles to Mozart.
There were unresolved dichotomies in his views on God — his music is rife with spiritual overtones — and women; he could be adoring on one song and violently misogynistic on the next.
Dyson — author of the controversial "I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr." — shines light on Shakur through exhaustive interviews with friends, colleagues, admirers, critics, social observers, lovers and Afeni Shakur.
