Why my parents didn't want me to listen to Tupac

Life and death is in the power of the tongue. That proverb applies perfectly to Tupac Shakur.

Proverbs 18:21 tells us that “Life and death is in the power of the tongue.” 

It’s hard to find a man those words apply better to than Tupac Shakur. And Will Smith is in second place.

I’m 40 now, and was 12 when Tupac died. Every bit of Tupac I listened to was unsanctioned and unapproved by my Mom and Dad. That outlaw factor made him more potent. Parents just don’t understand.

The problems my parents saw in Tupac were all the obvious stuff:

This man was talented, but troubled. He was obsessed with death. He talked a little bit about killing, and that was bad. But mostly about dying, and that was alarming. 

For all of Tupac’s gifts of self-expression, he couldn’t go a sentence without swearing. 

I was 12 when Tupac was killed in Vegas. For boys of a certain age, this felt something like having Martin Luther King or Malcolm X killed in your lifespan — at least at the time. 

At the time, it felt like one of society’s prophets was taken from us. For telling too much of the truth. 

But the reality of Tupac is different than I thought, and worse than my parents imagined. What we hadn’t seen this is a video clip from years before Tupac became a household name. As a teenager, Tupac was a student at a performing arts school in Baltimore.

The video resurfaces every few years, and did again recently on Twitter. A user named @AndySwan wrote:

“An entire culture was led to emulate and embrace violent gang behavior by ballerinas like this.”

Swan linked to a two-minute clip from the video, depicting Tupac as a 17-year-old, in his natural state. He’s an artist. He’s an actor. He’s effeminate. Check it out.

Ask yourself this: HOW did that guy, with his feminine mannerisms, turn himself into Makaveli, and get himself shot to death in Las Vegas. By age 25? CS Lewis said that we become what we pretend to be.

Like so many actors or pro wrestlers before him, Tupac worked himself into a shoot. And then into a shooting. Tupac’s acting career led him to an early grave.

If Tupac’s method acting did that much damage from age 17 to 25, how much more dangerous was it for the teenagers who looked up to him?

If I or my friends had seen that video of Tupac at 17, we never would have looked up to him. It would be too obvious he was only acting hard. 

To put it in pro wrestling terms, you can still be entertained by Stone Cold Steve Austin. But you don’t have to think he’s the baddest man on the planet. 

For more than 25 years, Will Smith has lived in Tupac’s shadow. All he did was become the biggest movie star in the world and have monster success in acting and music.

But in the eyes of his wife, Jada Pinkett, Smith could never quite compare to the late Tupac. Pinkett knew Tupac going back to their high school days. When he died, the eternal flame burned in her heart. 

There was always something missing. No matter how many entanglements she sought out, there was still a void. There was and is a Tupac-shaped hole in her heart. Pinkett has even claimed that Pac pillow-talked with her about their shared struggle with alopecia, if you want to know how things are going.

Pinkett is afflicted with the Curse of Eve, wherein nothing is good enough. She found it easier to venerate a dead Tupac than respect a living Will Smith. 

For years, Smith was the butt of many jokes about his odd marriage. But the only person he ever attacked for telling a joke was comedian Chris Rock. And in a fit of beta rage, he did it on the stage of the Oscars.

It’s exactly what Tupac might have done. What Makaveli might have done. What the Mom-raised boy from the Baltimore school of performing arts might have done.

I knew my parents were trying, in their hearts, to protect me. At the time, it wasn’t clear from what — from fun and women? 

No — from behaving myself into problems I can’t pray my way out of. From trying to copy the gangster who wasn’t even a gangster. Will Smith, a full grown man, traveled down the Tupac road. You think a teenager wouldn’t?

Life and death is in the power of the tongue. If that guy from that video can talk himself into playing gangster, anyone is capable of anything. My parents were right to worry about Tupac.