How Prince inspired Tupac’s career
Prince once said, “Hip hop is very diverse, but if you only focus on one aspect of it, then what you get is this image of Black America that is completely contrary to what actually goes on.” Tupac might have been troubled, but as an artist, he helped to illuminate the whole spectrum that hip hop has to offer at its trailblazing best. As it happens, one key inspiration on this journey was none other than the aforementioned little ‘Purple One’.
In 2016, a letter that the rapper penned to his high school crush when he was at the formative age of 17 went up for auction. It revealed two things; Firstly, it showed that beneath his tough exterior, he was as soft-centred as a humbug. Secondly, it confirmed the enigmatic superstar’s love for Prince. And perhaps a third tie between the two music stars was brought to the fore when Tupac said: “I’m not going to lie, I love women with a passion. Sometimes I just want to call Prince and say, ‘Can we hang?’ because I love women like he loves women.”
However, Tupac would have an ulterior motive, given his equal adoration of Prince. As his old love letter revealed when he pleaded with his passion: “‘We both love Prince we have both had heartbreak and we both adore candles,” the rapper wrote to his crush, a girl he called Beethoven for her virtuoso piano playing. It’s hardly Byronic love poetry, and lord knows if it secured him a date, but it is certainly of interest as a historical document. So much interest, in fact, that it fetched £24,000 ($33,000) at auction for the lucky Beethoven the II.
It is not the only time his love for the guitar god formerly known as Prince has been disclosed. Jamila Barnes, 2Pac’s cousin, revealed in an interview with BETNetworks, that the late artist would set up home concerts with family and friends when they were young. “He would have us perform different groups,” she recalled, “But his favourite that he would have us perform over and over again, would be Prince and The Revolution, and the main song we always did was ‘1999’.”
Far from typical gangster fodder, Tupac’s childhood performances are a pastiche of the homelife that Prince speaks of when it comes to the broad stroke of hip hop in the main. “We would sing into a spoon,” Barnes charmingly continues, “and he would introduce the ‘band’ in all his Prince glory, fully in character.” This would reportedly serve him well when he finally pursued his own music and channelled the ego of that ‘1999’ star.
Speaking about the sweet anecdote, his sister revealed that she asked him one day how he always gets to be Prince, to which he acrimoniously replied, in a perfect rendition, “I’m the one out here getting us work! Are you gonna be out here booking us jobs and getting us performances? Until you’re ready to be out here managing this group and taking us on tour I’m a be Prince! And if anybody got a problem with me being Prince, then they need to let me know!” There might have been an irony to it at the time, but he stayed true to Prince’s perfectionist creative drive.
Over the course of his glistening career, which was cut tragically short, the rapper sampled Prince’s ‘Do Me Baby’ for his cautionary ode to the City of Angels with ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’, as well as another track penned under his Makaveli alias ‘Me and My Girlfriend’ that samples ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.
The mutual respect between the two late luminaries resulted in a beautiful friendship, and between them, they produced some of the greatest music of an era. These early accounts of Tupac are sadly coloured in the sombre, bittersweet hue of a roaring creative flame, tragically snuffed out before its time in a controversial end that remains unsolved.
Nevertheless, Tupac’s trailblazing music lives on, inspired by Prince’s tenet of combining technology and spiritualism to create something fresh within music. As the star said: “Technology is cool, but you’ve got to use it as opposed to letting it use you.” Unlike some of his peers, Tupac never let a good beat get in the way of a good point.
