A Rose That Grew From Concrete

It has been 14 years since Tupac Shakur’s death, and ten years since The Rose That Grew from Concrete, and I don’t know what’s going on with stuff, or if other people know what’s going on. I’ve been too busy travelling the world in the past twenty years to know what’s going on in the media.  But I feel something universal, something that touches me, and I think his words are real, and maybe not heard. And perhaps there is something healing within them. Amidst the concrete, a rose grows.

Tupac says “rap” and other people say “hip-hop,” and I don’t know the difference. Guru said rap was the voice and hip-hop was the way of life, or the politics. “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” is a memorial album to Tupac Shakur, hip-hop artists putting Tupac’s music to poetry. He WAS a poet. Everyone has an image of Tupac, from his music, from his life, from what the media said about him.  I really don’t want to talk about the media circus. Because you can’t know a performer. None of what is seen is really true, and, I suppose, none of it is truly lies. I want to talk about music and how it touched me.

I see the son of black panthers. I see the descendant of African kings. I see an actor, a performer, a musician, a poet. I see a highly intelligent and dedicated man. I see a man who had a really hard life, someone who would do what he needed to succeed, someone who was dedicated to telling the Truth and making people think.

 Other people might see someone else. And Tupac said himself that people couldn’t know him, that the media could never show him. I don’t want to fight with anyone. There’s no point.

Tupac was born in 1971 and died in 1996. He died at 25. If he had lived he would be 39. I’m 46, and I am constantly looking at who I am, searching, and I will always be searching all my life. And the more honest a person is to themselves and the world around them the more questions they will have. “Constant and unremitting self critique!” And I have been finding bits and pieces of myself everywhere and in the words of Tupac. In the intro to the album Tupac mentions The Last Poets – who are innovators and heros well into their sixties and seventies today – and Tupac would be six years younger than me today if he was alive. And that’s really tragic, you know, and it sends tears into my eyes.

I don’t know what or why. Yeah, it’s about life and pain and taking that pain and building life out of it. And it’s about living hard and fast and swearing at the world and meeting violence with violence! Sure, rap is about who got shot and why with a strong backbeat and performers swearing at the world. I can’t speak to that because I didn’t come out of that. Hey, I’ve got my own problems. The Revolution might be about revenge or retribution. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

Watts Prophets sang of Pain. They also turned it into poetry. I don’t know who shot who or why, and that’s important. But Tupac was and is a poet. And maybe that’s important, too. Because that bass note is extremely aggressive and it does something to the content and style of the music. Drop it out and you are left with the words and meaning, which is the heart of hip-hop. I think. I thought I was talking about harsh, but I don’t know what harsh is. I keep listening. Thinking about what it means.

When Martin Luther King says “Let Freedom Reign” and Malcolm X shouts “Freedom Now” and Lauryn Hill sings “It’s freedom time now” they don’t mean only for some and not for others. Lewis Nkosi, a South African writer, shows that in The Prisoner. He turns the whole damn thing on its head and the prisoner becomes the jailer.

And what’s the point to that?

Babatunde Olantunji and Sikiru Adepoju set the first poem of Tupac’s, Wake me When I’m Free, to voice and music. “Please wake me when I’m free. I cannot bear captivity. For, I would rather be stricken blind than to live without expression of mind.” Mos Def, in “Can You See The Pride in the Panther” says “Every revolutionary act is an act of love. And this is an act of love.”

Mos Def hosts Def Jam and I when I saw those poets up there I thought that those poets were what I was talking about, about dropping the aggressive bass beat and getting back to to meaning. 

” target="_blank">But then I hear these guys. Cruise the poetry. Maybe “revenge” is the wrong word. And maybe being poor and harsh is just hip.

Hop. All I know is I don’t know, but it makes me feel, and it makes me think about who it is who is buying this “gangsta” rap, anyway. And who is it who is saying what is what and packaging and selling it. Think about that. And who am I? I don’t know, but when I hear “it,” and I don’t define it, because I can’t, I feel like I am touching the heart of something which is deep inside me too, and hurts me too, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know who I am.

So, yeah, it is a war of the mind, and of commercialism and fists and guns, and a bunch of people over here trying to polarize, because we need to polarize so we can understand and come together. So we can say “I’ve been there, too. I get it.” But I don’t go there, because “When your heart turns cold it causes your soul to freeze… A baby’s cry means nothing. A dead corpse is trivial…” I don’t want to touch that. I don’t want to be there. I don’t choose that. But we see pieces of that in the lives of others. Lives they don’t choose but have to live. And that is slavery.

Or maybe I am the other, somehow outlawed and outcast by the rest of the world. Maybe I am trapped in a system that will not let me rise so the middle class can look down on me and feel better about their own lives. Or maybe I am a country divided from itself, to question itself, fight with itself and the rest of the world, to destroy itself from within so the powers that be can feel unsullied from having to create lies about me. I have skills, my friend. I have talent, despite what the world may see. And I am tired of asking “Why?”

Because “No-one gave me the keys to the kingdom. ‘I felt bad’ the saying goes ‘because I had no shoes’. What crap is that? Because look at me. I’m the asshole with no feet…” and that’s from me, so I do see what’s going on, and every day I feel my past and it touches me, in how I interact with others, and Tupac can make me cry.

I’m going to listen to Lauryn Hill again. Then I’m going to turn on The Roots. Then I am going to do what Tupac told me to do and “think.”

And then I’m going to cry a bit again.