Tupac Amaru Shakur 1971-1996

Few magazines followed Tupac’s career as closely as Vibe, the New York hip-hop and R&B monthly co-founded by Quincy Jones. Less than a year after his death, its editors put out a memorial volume collecting the magazine’s key pieces on him, interviews, profiles and reports on the increasingly heated conflicts inside rap.

About the book

What it covers

The book is built from articles that first ran in Vibe: interviews with Tupac, profiles and reports on the conflicts in rap at the time. It is heavily illustrated; Kirkus Reviews counted around a hundred color photos. A recurring thread is how far the tensions in the scene, between East and West Coast, for one, may have contributed to his death. The book raises the question without answering it.

Assessment

A serious, timely press anthology. Kirkus wrote in 1997 that the pieces were aimed at readers already versed in hip-hop and that newcomers might feel lost, while praising the energy and frankness of the young critics and journalists. For fans, it called the book a useful overview of a short and controversial life.

Today its value is as a period document: it shows how one of the decade’s leading hip-hop magazines saw Tupac before years of myth-making set in. 1998 is sometimes given as the publication date, that was the paperback, and Alan Light is sometimes credited with the foreword; only Quincy Jones is confirmed.

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