People seem drawn to the incongruencies of famous people. Tupac's were manifold, whether it was his simultaneous celebration of thug life and desire to be remembered as a poet and writer, or his siding with the LA rappers in the East Coast-West Coast rivalry despite his own NYC roots. He was the descendant of African tribal royalty, and he was a gangsta sentenced on counts of sexual assault. The argument could be made that greatness more clearly illuminates the contradictions every human struggles with, and that Tupac and his faults were both larger than life.
Or you could say that he wasn't really a poet and all protests to the contrary were just posturing on his part, as well as on the parts of his fans and the critics. The lines "The Grammy's and the American music shows pimp us like hoes/they got dough but they hate us though," besides exhibiting an appalling ignorance of (or disregard for) grammar, sound more like whining than high art. Which, of course, is where the defendants jump in with, "But it's so real!"
How the hell is an insider complaining about the music industry's tight-fistedness "so real"? The only people who can really relate to lyrics like these aren't listening to Tupac anyway, they're busy recording their own albums, and whining their asses off. If Tupac's "poetry" consists of the reality of his subject matter, then it's surprisingly inaccessible to the general public—which is often the complaint made about true poets like Donne and Yeats, and the excuse given for ignoring them in favor of lesser artists. So what makes Tupac deserving of the effort, and not e.e. cummings?
He does talk about adolescent pregnancy, sexual abuse, his mom, his bros. And getting shot, dealing drugs, playing the rap game. While the first list is more universal, how many in America can really claim firsthand knowledge of the items in the second? They are definite problems in certain ghettos, but the majority of Tupac's audience and indefatigable defenders are middle- to upper-class white people who've never set foot in Compton and probably show up at anti-gun and anti-war rallies with some regularity. And with the image he creates of violence and angst and endless evil and fear, why would anyone want to enter his world?
They wouldn't, but they would like to imagine themselves in such circumstances. The great appeal of Tupac's music isn't the lyrical quality. A poet is someone who uses words to convey ideas and feelings that transcend the prosaic nature of life, not someone who continually tells people he's a poet until they agree with him. Tupac was a master of the latter method, a failure at the former. What he did for his listeners was to transport them, safely, into a sordid and dangerous existence they would never have, and then to transport them back out when they ejected the CD. Of course they couldn't admit that the only appeal was a sort of voyeurism, so they agreed that he was, indeed, a poet, and devoted magazine accolades to establishing this hypothesis.
I'm not trying to imply that for those whose lives are reflected in Tupac's songs his work has no value. But you don't rise to the kind of prominence he enjoyed without some help from The Man. And his complaint mentioned above reveals at least some of The Man's motivation—Tupac was (and continues to be) a big seller. But the people fueling the music industry machine with their purchases aren't living in poverty, they live in big houses and drive nice cars. They have everything they need, and can get anything they want, except excitement. Their lives are boring. What better way to infuse some thrills than with a rap album about thugs and shootings?
Tupac may have been doing his best to keep it real, but his continuing popularity is based on something far less visceral than the subject of his work. It's a kind of faux-realism for most listeners, an identity society has given them the freedom to assume as long as it is undertaken according to parameters and with a measure of privacy. Knowing they aren't alone, Tupac fans enter a kind of tribalism of their own, a less coherent version of the one he celebrates in his songs, but one that provides a sense of camaraderie they lack in their own lives.
The irony is that Tupac himself and his community would never allow any of these listeners into full communion. They will always be outsiders, arm-lengths apart, tainting their love with a distasteful element of self-loathing. The deeper irony, of course, is that the self-loathing apparent in the deceased rapper's lyrics is far more destructive in a healthy society than all the vice and violence he sings about in his songs.
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