613 words · 3 min
Panther Power
A teenager raps about his mother's party: Tupac's demo from around 1989 with Ray Luv, lost on cassette, released three times after his death.
- Recording
- around 1989, Bay Area (exact date and studio not documented)
- Release
- 2000 on The Lost Tapes, 2003 on the Tupac: Resurrection soundtrack, 2007 on Beginnings: The Lost Tapes 1988-1991
- Label
- first small labels (Herb ‘N Soul in the US, ZYX in Germany), 2003 Amaru Entertainment / Interscope Records, 2007 Koch Records / Amaru
- Production
- Chopmaster J (Jimi Dright) and Strictly Dope
- Writers
- Tupac Shakur, Raymond Tyson (Ray Luv), Mark Dorado, Jimi Dright
- With
- Ray Luv (credited as “Tyson” on the soundtrack)
- Length
- 4:36
- Samples
- not documented
At the end of the eighties, a young man from Marin City stands at a microphone in the Bay Area and raps about a party that barely exists anymore. The Black Panther Party dissolved in 1982. For Tupac it is family history: his mother sat in the dock as one of the “Panther 21” while she was pregnant with him.
Panther Power is one of the earliest surviving Tupac recordings. He made it with his first group, Strictly Dope, when nobody outside his circle of friends knew his name. The public only heard it after his death.
Demos with Ray Luv and Chopmaster J
According to the broadcaster KQED, Strictly Dope existed from 1988 to 1990. Tupac’s partner was Ray Luv, born Raymond Tyson and raised in Santa Rosa. The two knew each other from the writing circles of Leila Steinberg, who became Tupac’s first manager. The tracks were recorded and produced by Jimi “Chopmaster J” Dright, a co-founder of Digital Underground.
In 2001, AllHipHop dated the sessions to the summer of 1989. The laut.de critic considered the year an estimate, because one of the tapes contains a sample from a track released in late 1989. The recordings come from cassettes, not studio reels, and they sound like it.
A tribute to Afeni and the party
In substance, the song is a tribute to the Black Panther Party and to Afeni Shakur during her time as a party member. Tupac ties it to themes that never left him: slavery, Black nationalism, racism.
The background is well known. Afeni was arrested with the other New York Panthers in April 1969, defended herself in court and was acquitted in May 1971. A month later, Tupac was born. The page Tupac and the Black Panther Party tells the full story.
Released three times, never as a single
The track first appeared in 2000 as the opener of The Lost Tapes, a collection Chopmaster J put out without the estate’s consent. The estate asked retailers not to sell the CD; in May 2001 the two sides settled (news).
The song was released officially in 2003: Amaru put it on the soundtrack to the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum in December 2003. There, Panther Power sits among the hits as a document of the beginnings. In 2007 it again opened a reissue of the early tapes, this time titled Beginnings; more under Archive albums.
The political Tupac before Thug Life
Anyone who knows the later Tupac hears a different one here. Complex wrote in 2025 that anyone familiar with Panther Power knows that before fame, Tupac was more a politically charged street poet than a representative of Thug Life. The same stance runs through his poem Can U C the Pride in the Panther.
The song never found a large audience. By October 21, 2026, kworb.net counted around 1.25 million Spotify plays, a fraction of the well-known titles.
That is exactly why it is worth listening: before Death Row and Thug Life, there was an eighteen-year-old explaining where he came from.