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" Prior to September 13, 1996, neither I, nor anyone I knew growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, looked up at Tupac Amaru Shakur.  We heard Tupac&amp;#039;s debut verse on Digital Underground&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Same Song&amp;quot; at Lerthon&amp;#039;s house and thought he rhymed like a kid who wanted to be down. We watched Tupac in Juice on Stacey&amp;#039;s VCR and figured he wanted to be O-Dog from Menace.  We listened to Tupac&amp;#039;s stacked vocals and were convinced he lacked the vocal gravity and lyrical imagination of our uncles, Chuck D and KRS-One, or the mesmerizing psychological affliction of our big brothers, Scarface and Ice Cube.  Tupac seemed too sensitive and reckless to be older than us, yet too meticulously thoughtful to be younger. We knew Tupac would fight for us, with us and against us, when the time came. And we knew he expected the same fight from us, too. We thought he was one of us and looked at him to keep our balance. We looked Tupac Shakur straight in the eye, and he looked back. When the music stopped, he refused to hit us upside the head with clumsy clich\u00E9s and twinkly phraseology. He told the truth, without rhyme, unlike anyone we&amp;#039;d ever heard. During his first interview for MTV, Kurt Loder lobbed the trite question of &amp;quot;Can you tell me some of the things that someone like you who grows up in the inner city deals with?&amp;quot;  Tupac told him: &amp;quot;Our family crest was cotton. The only thing we can leave behind is culture, is music. Dignity and determination, that&amp;#039;s what we have. I feel like I&amp;#039;m cheated. Instead of me fulfilling my prophecy, I have to start one. Instead of me doing a good job of carrying on an empire, I have to build one. That&amp;#039;s a hell of a job for a 21-year-old. That&amp;#039;s a hell of a job for any youngster, male or female, to have to build an empire for your family.&amp;quot; By 1994, at age 23, Tupac had become the reckless outlaw of his and others&amp;#039; lyrical compositions. Like too many of us, he flirted recklessly with bullets, police, money, curious women, and mean men. While the media focused on his first shooting in New York City and the eleven months he served in a correctional facility for sexually abusing a 19-year-old woman, something else was happening. The precision and believability of his art finally caught up with the breadth of his social vision. Somehow, Tupac&amp;#039;s voice, which once seemed almost brittle to us, became an inflected instrument, one that could whisper, chant, and bellow at any point in a song. His majestic manipulation of the long &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; in words like &amp;quot;adversary,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;crazy,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;cemetery,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;memories,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;bury,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Hennessey,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;misery,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;bleed,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;please,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;free,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Gs,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;me,&amp;quot; and, of course, &amp;quot;enemies,&amp;quot; made millions of people believe, not only him, but his version of their truth. Then he got shot on September 7, 1996. I was 21 years old, four years younger than Tupac. Bullets and love had run me away from Mississippi one year earlier, and I landed in a progressive place out in the middle of some Ohio cornfields. Oberlin College was peopled with what my Grandma called &amp;quot;good white folks.&amp;quot; One of these good white folks, a short wobbly drunk whose name I can&amp;#039;t remember, tapped me on my shoulder as I was coming out of the shower late Saturday night. He told me that Tupac had been shot again in Las Vegas.  &amp;quot;MTV told me,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s true.&amp;quot; Without knowing how many times he&amp;#039;d been shot, where the bullets landed, how, or if he made it to the hospital alive, I knew that he was going to die.  I didn&amp;#039;t know much as a 21-year-old in the fall of 1996, but I knew intimately the ways that black American ambition unchecked by healthy doses of fear lead to slow, painful deaths. I also knew that when enough rusty bullets were fired from traumatized citizens at moving black targets (no matter how passionate, willful, sensual, and imaginative those targets might be), the targets would eventually cease to exist.  This is our American story. This is part of the story of Tupac Shakur.  As a grown man who now makes a living teaching and tapping on the worn screen doors of American memory and imagination, I still can&amp;#039;t find space for a 41-year-old Tupac Shakur. I&amp;#039;d like to believe that Tupac would have gotten even better as an artist, activist, and critical citizen. But I can&amp;#039;t figure out how someone so brilliant, so committed to honest exploration, so willing to fight for us, with us and against us, could ever live beyond 25 years of age in our United States. Today, on the sixteenth anniversary of Tupac&amp;#039;s death, I need help imagining how a 25-year-old Tupac might have engaged with the world the day after September 11, 2001. What would that 25-year-old Tupac have done after his people were left drowning in poisonous water on August 29, 2005? How would he touch the millions of brothers and sisters in prison-industrial complexes and the thousands of young brothers taking turns dying and killing in Chicago, Jackson, Oakland, Little Rock, New Orleans, Newark, Detroit, Gary, Poughkeepsie, and Flint?  The Republican and Democratic national conventions culminated this year without one mention of these American citizens, their lives or the responsibility the nation has to them. Not only would they not talk to them; they refused to even talk about them. While many of us were beaming with joy at Michelle, Bill, and Barack&amp;#039;s speeches, a part of me wondered what those political stars, on the left and the right, were doing at 25 years old.  Bill Clinton was milling around the halls of Yale Law School hitting on a 24-year-old law student named Hillary Rodham. Barack Obama was trying his hand at community organizing in Chicago. Michelle Robinson, prior to becoming Michelle Obama, had just finished her first year as an associate at Sidley &amp;amp;amp; Austin, a corporate law firm in Chicago. Mitt Romney was finishing up his senior year as an English major at BYU. Strange. By the time he was 25, Tupac Amaru Shakur had recorded six albums and starred in five movies. He&amp;#039;d had five bullets enter his body and had gone to prison for eleven months. He travelled around the world, influencing the life and art of millions of people and talking about organizing a national movement against poverty and police brutality. He had shot two white off-duty cops in Atlanta who were harassing a black man, and beat the case. By the time he was 25, Tupac Shakur fought to stay alive for six days in a Las Vegas hospital after three new bullets entered his body. And less than three months after his 25th birthday, Tupac Shakur was dead.  Strange. I kept longing for that Tupac hologram from Coachella to make an appearance at the DNC last week. I didn&amp;#039;t want the hologram to necessarily diss the president. I wanted the hologram to do what President Obama, the Republicans, you, me, and all those critics paid to entertain and critique are unable to do. I wanted it to glide onto the stage right after President Obama talked about citizenship. I wanted it to sit on the edge of that stage, dangling its feet in front of the world. When President Obama frowned, leaned towards the teleprompter directly in front of him, and used one of his voices to say &amp;quot;Come on, Pac. What are you doing?&amp;quot; I wanted the hologram to say to President Obama what the actual Tupac Shakur had already said to us. &amp;quot;What you lookin&amp;#039; all sad for? Nigga, you black. Smile for me now.&amp;quot;  And as President Obama broke awkwardly into a worried smile before getting rushed off by Secret Service, the hologram would stand up, wink his eye at our president, walk toward the president&amp;#039;s podium, and say what the actual Tupac said to us when he was alive. &amp;quot;Everybody is smart enough to know that we&amp;#039;ve been slighted. And we wanted ours, and I don&amp;#039;t mean 40 acres and a mule, because we&amp;#039;re past that. But we need help. For us to be on our own two feet, we do need help. Because we have been here. We have been a good friend. It&amp;#039;s like you got a good friend you never look out for. Everybody needs a little help on their way to self-reliance.&amp;quot; And as Secret Service rushed the podium and started haphazardly putting their hands through him, he would smile and keep going. &amp;quot;They can&amp;#039;t touch me... There&amp;#039;s no way these people can own planes, and there&amp;#039;s people who don&amp;#039;t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants.&amp;quot; The audience in Charlotte, unsure whether to clap, cry, smile, or run away, would keep staring up at the hologram. Still smiling, the hologram would keep going. &amp;quot;It just don&amp;#039;t make sense to me. It don&amp;#039;t. When there&amp;#039;s hopelessness, people revolt... All bullshit aside, it all comes down to we gotta survive. Even warriors put their spears down on Sunday. We got to survive here in this country because I&amp;#039;m not going back to Africa. We gotta survive here. And for us to survive here, white folks, black folks, Korean folks, Mexican folks, Puerto Ricans, we gotta understand each other.&amp;quot; At this point, everyone would realize they couldn&amp;#039;t hurt him. They couldn&amp;#039;t touch him. All they could do is listen. &amp;quot;We gotta take a bigger chance. And when I say American, people think I&amp;#039;m talking about Uncle Sam... I mean you. You! You! You need to check yourself and see how racist you are. It&amp;#039;s real.&amp;quot; I know it&amp;#039;s not fair, but I just wish Tupac Shakur could have never been touched. That way, we would have never had to look up at him.  --Kiese Laymon is the author of the forthcoming novel Long Division and a book of essays called On Parole: An Autobiographical Antidote to Post-Blackness. He is an Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Africana Studies at Vassar College. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a15784/tupac-shakur-death-anniversary-12669159/>