Holler If You Hear Me: searching for Tupac Shakur
Michael Eric Dyson Plexus Publishing, 302pp, £12.99
ISBN 0859653226
Almost exactly a year before the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, another icon bled to death in a car at a horribly young age, the gangsta rapper and movie star Tupac Shakur. Tupac has been described variously as a ghetto Elvis (a poor boy who arrived at a moment when music was ripe to be smashed and rebuilt), a black Hemingway (a man who lived his art), even a latter-day Jesus of the LA 'burbs. But before this study, his life and work had too often been explained not in relation to his own context, but by simplistic comparison with white icons.
Michael Eric Dyson is at his best when he explores the political factors in Tupac's life, travelling with him on the long journey (socially, but not geographically) from the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles to the Hollywood Hills. He exposes the canard, often voiced by lazy commentators, that poor black Americans have, in the words of one right-wing LA columnist, "no politics to speak of". After all, such right-wingers argue, they don't vote (less than 15 per cent of young black men participated in the last presidential election), and US politicians usually glance in their direction only long enough to give them a hard kick.
By drawing out the various strands of black political thought underpinning Tupac's music, Dyson shows that black Americans, instead of retreating from political life, are finding different cultural spaces (such as rap music) in which to express their views, because those who control the existing political structures have shat on them for too long. Tupac's remarkable music appealed at least in part because its intensely political messages of alienation and disconnected rage resonated with black Americans.
The most obvious influence on Tupac's early politics is his mother's active membership of the Black Panthers, the African-American nationalist, revolutionary group. Tupac was attracted to the idea of violently resisting the "white occupation" of his "ghetto", and the pseudo-Marxist rhetoric of his mother, Afeni Shakur, seemed at times to offer a legitimation for these urges.
Yet, as Dyson argues, Tupac was swiftly confronted with the dilemma of "negotiating his revolutionary upbringing in a post-revolutionary world". Both the peaceful dreams of Martin Luther King and the revolutionary solutions of Malcolm X had been long since burnt out by the time Tupac and his generation began looking for outlets for their sense of injustice.
So Tupac adopted (and in turn crafted) the ugly world of "thug culture", the rancid afterbirth from the traumatic delivery of the civil rights movement. The cultural critic Stanley Crouch has recognised the film The Godfather as the canonical text of self-proclaimed "thugs". It outlines their belief system, which holds that "family" (in this case, the gang) is everything, that money and murder are valid means to enhance the status of the family, and that death is a constant threat. Tupac himself sang, towards the end of his life, that he was "just a thug . . . a man with money".
Martin Luther King's dream has taken so long to arrive (and even now, it doesn't seem to be on the horizon) that Tupac's beautiful, hopeless hymns of despair are all that King's descendants have to cling to. Dyson is one of the first serious critics to acknowledge that Tupac had the intellect and eloquence to give a public voice to this political belief structure, the day-to-day creed of millions of the rapper's "homeboys".
Dyson does not shy away from the ugly side of this world. There is a chapter dedicated to its rank misogyny, whereby women are invariably "bitches" or "hos", and which describes how Tupac served 11 months in jail for a sexual assault. He does underplay, however, the insane tribalism into which Tupac descended in the last year of his life. Tupac started an entirely pointless "war" between East Coast and West Coast rappers, ending with the slaying of some of rap's biggest talents (including himself) - a narrative that Dyson pretty much skirts over.
The anti-intellectualism of a great deal of rap has often led to commentators underestimating its social significance. We are blessed that, in Tupac, we had a fiercely intelligent young man who could rise within this climate and explain it to us. He read constantly and widely, from Plato and Mikhail Bakunin to Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Jung. Dyson's book fires a belated starting pistol for what should be decades of debate about the life and work of the much-missed Tupac Shakur.
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