Got Your Back: The Life of a Bodyguard in the Hardcore World of Gangsta Rap

In the last year of Tupac Shakur’s life, no one stood closer to him than Frank Alexander, his bodyguard. In Got Your Back, written with Heidi Siegmund Cuda, he looks back on that time. The English-language book came out under several subtitles.

The facts

Who’s telling the story?

Alexander grew up in Chicago and was a former Marine, a bodybuilder and a professional bodyguard. From 1995 he worked for Suge Knight’s Death Row Records and soon became Tupac’s main bodyguard, and, as he tells it, a friend. He was on duty in Las Vegas on the night of the shooting in September 1996.

What it’s about

The book follows Tupac through his year at Death Row under Suge Knight, in the thick of the East Coast-West Coast feud, and also covers his relationship with Kidada Jones. Alexander portrays Tupac as a man full of contradictions, driven, hot-tempered, generous and caring. He reconstructs at length what went wrong in Las Vegas and describes how he himself was blamed afterwards and dropped by the Death Row circle. He also offers his theories on the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.

Verdict

An insider account: valuable because it comes from an eyewitness, but subjective. Publishers Weekly praised the vivid portrait but found the ending overly sentimental. Kirkus Reviews was mixed, arguing that the book sets out to challenge “thug life” clichés and then falls into them, not least in how it talks about women. It still matters as one of the few voices from Tupac’s immediate circle during that period. More on the night of the shooting: Death.