Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur

From Pitchfork and Guardian contributor Dean Van Nguyen comes a revelatory history of Tupac beyond his musical legend, as a radical son of the Black Panther Party whose political legacy still resonates today.

Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded no fewer than ten platinum albums, starred in major films, and became an activist and political hero known the world over. In this cultural history, journalist Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac’s coming of age, fame, and cultural capital, and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprisings. Words for My Comrades engages--crucially--with the influence of Tupac’s mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party and dedication to dismantling American imperialism and police brutality informed Tupac’s art. Tupac’s childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his stepfather’s Marxist beliefs, became his own riveting code of ethics that helped listeners reckon with America’s inherent injustices.

Using oral histories from conversations with the people who shaped Tupac’s life and career, many of whom were interviewed for the first time here--from Panther elder Aaron Dixon, to music video director Stephen Ashley Blake, to friends and contemporaries of Tupac’s mother--Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics.

Van Nguyen reveals how Tupac and Afeni each championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways, and how their mother-son bond charts a narrative of the last fifty years of revolutionary Black American politics. Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.

DEAN VAN NGUYEN is a music journalist and cultural critic for Pitchfork, The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, and Jacobin, among others. He is based in Dublin, Ireland.