When it comes to Tupac content, it feels like there was no stone left unturned. Every unreleased song, every verse in the vault, scrapped hooks, adlibs, spoken word tangents, has been seemingly released. There was a ravenous desire to capitalize on his illustrious legacy through posthumous albums. The same goes for interviews, released for the sake of unearthing archives or just cashing off of name value. Regardless, if there’s something about Pac, it’s likely already out there on the internet.
However, there is one exception. Apparently, legendary hip-hop interviewer Angie Martinez is sitting on an unreleased conversation from 1996. Now, she’s explaining why she’s so hesitant to share the Tupac footage. Recently, Martinez spoke with Charlamagne Tha God, where they talked about the ‘inflammatory’ conversation. The interview only ever aired for around 12 minutes, but the entirety of her talk with Pac lasted an hour and 40 minutes. Ultimately, she didn’t want to release it amidst the massive East Coast vs West Coast feud. At the time, there was genuine concern that sharing the whole Pac convo would’ve potentially brought further violence.
Angie Martinez Feared Tupac’s Interview Would Get People Hurt
“That’s probably why I never put the [Tupac] tapes out. I think about the people that are going to get hurt from that. Even the people that are talked about on the tape, how that lands,” Martinez admits. “There’s people [he talks about] who are no longer here, not just Big. I mean, there’s people in the rap world who passed, and he’s talking about them, and not in a way that’s helpful to the world. He was angry at the time. He was twenty-four, in the middle of a war, you know, an internal war. So he’s talking s*** about everybody.”
Similarly, Martinez told Billboard in a 2016 conversation that she’s proud of sticking with her instincts back then. She didn’t risk even the mere possibility that the war between East and West could get worse. If it meant not sharing the full Tupac conversation and maximizing that publicity, so be it. “It taught me a good lesson; I went with my gut; I didn’t know how it was going to work out,” Martinez told the publication. “I was scared to air this interview, and I didn’t want to be responsible for making it worse. And the truth is that I made that decision and I’m proud of that after all these years later.”
Nowadays, Angie Martinez is curious about letting the public hear the Tupac interview. However, let her call it, it really wasn’t all that great of a conversation anyway. Given that she was still pretty new to the hip-hop media landscape, there was a ton of room for improvement. “I was twenty. It’s not a seasoned, evolved Angie Martinez on the radio. It’s a brand new Angie Martinez on the radio. There’s not a lot of follow-up questions,” she tells Charlamagne.
The post Angie Martinez Explains Why She’s Nervous to Share Previously Unreleased Tupac Interview appeared first on VICE.
