Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur By Michael Eric Dyson. Basic Books, 292 pages, $24.00
I'll never forget the one and only time I saw TupacAmaru Shakur, meanderingdown Michigan Avenue, Chicago's main strip, with two thug homies. It wasmidsummer 1993, yet all wore enough winter garments to shock the sun, despite the94-degree sizzle. Shakur held his sweatshirt up to show off the infamous "ThugLife" tattoo etched across his stomach, along with other calligraphic markings.At 5'6", the rapper was not the imposing figure he appeared to be on television.But he was audacious to the point of hilarity, and he had the kind of pressingneed to be seen and heard that one would expect in a rising recording star.
If he didn't quite seem larger than life then, he does now. There iscurrently no rap artist as exalted in death as Shakur. Five years after he wasgunned down in Las Vegas, Shakur is revered around the world, not just inAmerica's inner cities but as far away as Soweto's townships and Brazil'sfavelas. He is by far the most successful rapper ever, with more than 30million albums sold; this makes him the only rap star to rank among the 20 mostsuccessful solo artists of all time. There are dozens of Web sites dedicated toShakur's memory, and last year saw the success of an off-Broadway play based onhis life and the number one Billboard-chart debut of his latest posthumous release, Until the End of Time.
In Holler If You Hear Me, Michael Eric Dyson attempts to explain the mythic staying power of Tupac Shakur, while also looking at the broader significance of hip-hop culture. This is not a new area of interest for Dyson, a Baptist minister and professor of religious studies at DePaul University, who frequently quotes prominent rap artists in public appearances. The best-selling author, who earned his doctorate in religion from Princeton University and has taught at Columbia and Brown, angered many by comparing the late Shakur to Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book I May Not Get There with You: The True MartinLuther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000). He also considered the global significance of hip-hop in a 1997 collection of essays, Between God andGangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture.
Dyson sees Shakur as "perhaps the representative figure of his generation,"who by unabashedly speaking about his rearing and lifestyle was a mouthpiece formillions of disenfranchised black youths who grew up just like him. "In hishaunting voice," writes Dyson, "can be heard the buoyant hopefulness and thedesperate hopelessness that mark the outer perimeters of the hip-hop culture heeagerly embraced, as well as the lives of the millions of youth who admired andadored him."
Holler If You Hear Me draws heavily on the firsthand recollections of family, friends, colleagues, and contemporaries of Shakur. They range from rap don Dr. Dre to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who sees hip-hop as, among other things, "a conversation among and between black youth from one part of the country to another." The book works as a collection of essays examining Shakur's many influences, experiences, accomplishments, and lived contradictions, and it leaves the legacy of Shakur more intact than one might expect given the fractured life the star lived.
A sort of prince of paupers, Shakur came into the world in thewaning days of the black-power movement--born in Brooklyn in 1971 to AfeniShakur, who, like so many of her revolutionary contemporaries, ultimately fellvictim to addiction. Tupac's militant parents thrust him simultaneously into theworlds of radical politics and abject poverty. He grew up primarily in Harlem andBaltimore, where he later attended the exceptional Baltimore School for the Artsbefore dropping out and moving to Marin City, California, leaving his mother tocope with her crack habit. In California, Shakur got his start in rap music as amember of the West Coast bohemian party group Digital Underground.
With the release in 1991 of his solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now, Shakur gained instant fame. The album contained tracks like "Brenda's Got a Baby," in which he lamented the plight of a teenage mother, and "If My Homie Calls," his declaration of solidarity with friends in jail and on the streets. A five-year period of productivity followed, during which Shakur released four critically acclaimed hit albums, among them the defiant Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993), the appropriately titled Me Against the World (1995), and the two-disk set All Eyez on Me (1996). He also appeared in half a dozen films, playing the lead in several, including John Singleton's PoeticJustice (1993), and Gridlock'd, which was released in 1997 after Shakur's death the year before.
Shakur's creative output coincided with numerous run-ins with the law, troublethat seemed to escalate as his popularity grew. Most notably, in 1993, he wascharged with shooting two off-duty police officers (the charges were laterdropped). In the fall of 1994, he was convicted of sexual assault, before beingshot outside his New York recording studio the next day. He ultimately served 11months of a four-year sentence. The second attempt on his life led to his deathin September 1996, six days after he was shot by unknown assailants on LasVegas's main strip, probably as a result of a bicoastal hip-hop feud that Shakurhelped to fuel. Shortly thereafter came his first posthumous release, 7 DayTheory, under the pseudonym Makaveli, which seemed to anticipate his own death and which set the stage for his legend.
Dyson notes the contradiction that the young Shakur saw between his mother'srevolutionary ideals and her debilitating crack addiction, which caused Tupacand his siblings to suffer extended periods of abandonment and homelessness. Manyof Shakur's songs celebrate his mother's heroism while simultaneously denouncingher failure to provide for her offspring. They also best exemplify his mixedmessage--and indeed, his deeply ambivalent mind.
In Shakur's famous tribute "Dear Mama" (from Me Against the World), he declares: "Even as a crack fiend Mama / You always was a Black Queen Mama / I finally understand / For a woman, it ain't easy tryin' to raise a man." Shakur was quick to blast away at American society--but he readily acknowledged the shortcomings of individuals, even those of his own flesh and blood. "They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor / Say there ain't no hope for the youth and the truth is it ain't no hope for the future / And then they wonder why we crazy / I blame my mother, for turning my brother into a crack baby," he exclaims in "Keep Ya Head Up," one of his most enduring tunes (from Strictly 4 MyN.I.G.G.A.Z.).
To Dyson, Shakur is the "conflicted metaphor of the black revolution's largeaspirations and failed agendas," a sort of rebirth of the Black Panther anger andanxieties in musical form. Shakur celebrated his mother's radical politics inearly recordings such as "Panther Power," a song off his debut. Yet he laterbecame more practical, more commercial, and perhaps more nihilistic as his careerprogressed, and ultimately proved unable to reconcile his unabashed depravity attimes with his hope for black empowerment and uplift.
In songs such as "White Man'z World," he even gives his "apologies to my truesisters; far from bitches / Help me raise my black nation reparations are due,it's true / Caught up in this world I took advantage of you." In such lyrics,Shakur seemed to be a voice for the powerless; but in other tunes he deliveredlittle more than misogynistic diatribes. In "I Get Around," his first crossoverhit, he childishly declares: "All respect to those who break their neck to keeptheir 'ho's in check / Cause oh they sweat a brother majorly / and I don't knowwhy, your girl keeps pagin' me?"
Dyson argues that Shakur should not be blamed for the nihilism he embodied,given the circumstances he came from. "After all, he was in part playing out thecards dealt to him, extending and experimenting with the script he was handed atbirth," says Dyson, though in "fleeing from art to the actual, from appearance toreality, from the studio to the streets, Tupac lost his life." In the finalanalysis, Dyson sees Shakur as a modern-day martyr who, despite the competing discourses he embraced, exposed the tragedies of America's ghettos to a globalaudience. Holler If You Hear Me is in fact "an attempt to take measure of both impulses, and in the process, say something meaningful about urban black existence."
Clearly, Shakur was continually pulled in two directions, oneconstructive, empowering, and uplifting, the other hedonistic, nihilistic, andmisogynistic. As Dyson puts it, "the edifying and the terrifying in this singularartist lived on the same block." But this is gangsta rap's simultaneous blessingand curse, and given "its universal popularity, and its troubling effects," Dysonsays, "hip hop is a vital cultural language that we had all better learn." For to"ignore its genius, to romanticize its deficits, or to bash it with undiscerninggeneralities is to risk the opportunity to engage our children about perhaps themost important cultural force in their lives."
Some don't see it that way. John W. McWhorter, the hour's leading youngblack neoconservative, writing recently in The New Republic, argues that Shakur's positive songs were nothing more than token gestures in a broader panorama of despair. To McWhorter, "this allegedly exemplary voice of black America is teaching almost nothing but hopelessness." The profanity, the misogyny, the quest for wealth--it's all part of the "promotion of an anti-black stereotype," in McWhorter's view. "To elevate the parochial impressions of a kid with his eye on the till to the level of Martin Luther King's dream is rather an insult to black America," he charges.
These are criticisms Dyson anticipated, writing of those who "are unable to acknowledge the ingenuity of artistically exploring the attractions and limits ofblack moral and social subcultures. [Such critics] endorse a 'positive'perspective that is as artificial and uncomprehending of the full sweep of blackculture as is the exclusive celebration of pimps, playas, hos, macks, and thugs."As much as McWhorter and others may wish to dismiss Shakur out of hand, to do sois to dismiss a whole generation of black youths who (like Shakur)simultaneously embrace destructiveness and resistance.
That's not to say that Dyson's book is without its flaws. For whatever reason,the reader is rarely given more than a few lines of Shakur's lyrics to ponder,while Dyson delivers lengthy examinations of Shakur's place within the hip-hopcanon or the popularity of black thuggery in the mass market. In leaving Shakur'sown words out of such discussions (there is not even a lyrics reference in theappendix), Dyson does the artist a disservice. For more than most criticsacknowledge, hip-hop artists like Shakur often weigh in on the very debates theycreate through their music. "Papa'z Song" is one of the few that Dyson examinesat any length. In it Shakur spends two verses deriding his father's absence inhis childhood; then he spends the third verse speaking from the perspective ofhis father, allowing the father to explain that his inability to support hischildren forced him to leave.
What's more, some may take issue with Dyson's positive spin on virtually everyaspect of Shakur's life--and at times Dyson leaves himself open to this kind ofcriticism. At one point in the book, hoping to give yet another example ofShakur's open heart and love of children, he recounts how during a break fromfilming Above the Rim in 1994, Shakur went off to smoke marijuana with some buddies. A young girl saw him. According to Dyson, because Shakur cared about children so much, he pulled the girl aside to offer her this insight: What he was doing was wrong, and she shouldn't follow his example. The incident speaks more to the gap between Shakur's words and his actions, as well as to his inconsistent nature and relative youth. Dyson's generous interpretation indicates a lack of necessary skepticism and stretches the boundaries of credibility.
Despite such drawbacks, the intelligent reader should not lose sight of thefact that Dyson, as a Baptist minister, was tutored more in the art of love thanin that of scorn. While Holler does not manage to capture all of Shakur's brilliance or depravity, Dyson's broader conclusions will leave even the nonfan with something to think about. He asks us what more we can ask of those ghetto youths unfortunate enough to be consigned, often permanently, to the black underclass than to speak out about their failures and the part our society played in them. "Our adoration of [Shakur]--and our disdain for his image--says as much about us as it does about him," Dyson writes. We cannot expect the revolutionary agenda of a man who died just past the age of 25 to be perfectly coherent; but we can expect his existential screams and hollers to be both that of a boy and a man. For the powerful and moving style in which Shakur made himself heard, he will not be forgotten.
