Tupac always rapped with an ominous fixation on death. He looked at life with a tragically ironic sense of paranoia that something bad would happen to him. Even with all of his success, Pac knew how ugly and dour everything around him could be. That’s why songs like “Death Around The Corner” feel so fatalistic or why “Hail Mary” sounds like a graveyard.
It expanded past the music, too. His interviews would often challenge the world’s notions and seemed to prophesy his death. Take his interview with Benjamin Svetkey for Entertainment Weekly, for example. As Tupac ordered a vegetable spring roll and a Dungeness crab cake, the journalist inquired about the future. Given the booming success in hip-hop and the blossoming acting career, what does he see for himself in 10-15 years?
Ultimately, Pac never imagined a sense of normalcy and calm. He’d either be bathing in riches or die too soon to see any of it. “In a cemetery. Not in a cemetery. Sprinkled in ashes, smoked up by my homies. Worst case… I mean, that’s the worst case,” he sighs. “Best case: multimillionaire. Owning all of this s***. You know what I’m saying?”
Tupac gave a Sobering prediction of where He Would be 10 years from 1994
The saddest thing of all is that he never imagined his success and perseverance would last in the long term. Instead, he looked at it as a phoenix rising before inevitably burning down. “Because anywhere else, if I was white, I would have been like John Wayne. You know what I’m saying? Somebody who pulled himself up from their bootstraps. From poverty. From welfare,” Tupac explains. “Now, I am kissing Janet Jackson. I’m doing movies. I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play. You know what I’m saying?”
For Pac, his purpose was to be a beacon of hope and power for economically disadvantaged Black people. If he could empower people to rise above their circumstances, to open a pathway out of the trappings, he felt he would accomplish what he was sent to earth to fulfill.
“I’m not really that educated. And I’m not really a religious person. But I believe that God wants me to do something, and it has to do with Thug Life,” Tupac says. “You know, I want there to be a life for the street element. Instead of we always getting shut out. Instead of defenseless, having power.”
The post ‘That’s the Worst Case’: Tupac Shakur’s Heartbreaking Reflections on Life 10 Years From Now in 1994 appeared first on VICE.
