Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur
Words for My Comrades ambitiously sets out to transcend the standard pop star biography, carefully knotting the evolution of hip-hop into a sweeping account of 20th-century radical US politics. It’s a narrative so wide-ranging and so rich in eyewitness testimony that the story of Tupac almost feels like a vehicle, a history delivery system, overshadowed in all the high-stakes drama and incendiary intrigue ... Even amid such deadly seriousness, though, Van Nguyen finds moments of absurdity: the Panthers' Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver’s very radical design for a pair of trousers ...
It’s no secret that heroes can often be complicated, clay-footed, hard to like, and that doesn’t make them any less fascinating. It’s no failing of this learned, compassionate narrative, though, that Shakur the man remains elusive, not much more substantial than the hologram version who appeared with Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg at 2012’s Coachella festival. After reading this book’s final bleak pages, it is the image of Afeni that lingers, out on the streets of Harlem, fuelling the revolution one breakfast at a time.
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Insightful ... In Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, Van Nguyen contextualizes the hallowed lyrics of Shakur’s music by contrasting a personal biography of the rapper with relevant history lessons on, among others, the Black Panthers and Malcolm X ... It can be slightly difficult to follow the threads of Van Nguyen’s narrative as it frequently jumps from the biographical to the historical to explain how figures like Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and moments like the 1966 Hunters Point uprising in San Francisco ultimately informed Shakur’s work ... Other elements are presented with more ambiguity. Van Nguyen spends little time covering the more unsavory elements of Tupac’s timeline, including his involvement in the accidental shooting death of a 6-year-old boy in Marin City in 1992 and the sexual assault charges he faced in 1995. Both earn brief mentions in the text, but Van Nguyen fails to elucidate on whether either incident made a lasting impact on Shakur or his music ... It’s obvious categorizing his contributions solely under the guise of music is, to Van Nguyen, a failure to recognize all that the late rapper gave and continues to give us.
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Such reverential descriptions sometimes clash, however, with Van Nguyen’s attempts to make sense of more troubling aspects of Shakur’s biography, such as his conviction for sexual abuse. The result is an avid yet muddled portrait of an enigmatic superstar.
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