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Abstract
Growing up in the Bronx and Harlem, Tupac learned and excelled in the verbal dexterity and exuberances that characterize African American working class speech culture. At the same time Tupac also absorbed influences from his mother's political past. From Afeni, from Afeni's husband Lumumba Shakur and from Lumumba's brother, Muula Shakur all former Black Panther activists. Tupac learned to believe that racism, economic discrimination and other forms of oppression contributed to the poverty and powerless of working class Blacks.
Tupac Shakur's death on Friday, September 13, 1996, at the early age of 25, brought to an end a complex life marked both by personal controversy and artistic success. His impressive achievements include six solo rap albums, over 30 singles, starring or significant roles in six movies and a body of poems anthologized as The Rose that Grew from Concrete and published posthumously by his mother, Afeni Shakur. Tupac was clearly a performer with multi-dimensional abilities whose contributions to his art deserve to be studied from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints (see Armond White, 1997). This paper is meant to contribute to that effort. It will focus on comparing linguistic and discourse features of Tupac's poetry with the lyrics of the raps in his debut album 2Calypse Now with a view to explaining his success as a rapper compared to his limited impact as a poet. First, I propose that Tupac's upbringing contributed to his complex personal and artistic behavior and also to the central differences between his raps and his poetry. Then I compare and contrast the poems and raps in terms of topics, style, and content. Finally, I offer some general hypotheses about the reasons for the success of the raps compared to the indifferent reception of the poems.
Tupac was born in 1971 and raised in poor innercity neighborhoods in New York. His father, Billy Garland, as well as his mother Afeni Shakur, had been significant figures in the Black Panther Movement of the 1960s. Thus, from the beginning Tupac was immersed in the culture of the African American urban working class while simultaneously being influenced by the political views, militant passions, and wider social exposure of his mother and her Black Panther colleagues.
Growing up in the Bronx and...