U R Ripping Us Apart!!!

The “you” in this poem is not a person, but the drug. “Dedicated 2 Crack” is one of the harshest dedications Tupac ever wrote. In U R Ripping Us Apart!!!, he indicts the drug that tore his family apart. The poem appears in the third section of The Rose That Grew from Concrete, “Just a Breath of Freedom”.

Three Were One Until One Grew Weak

Tupac describes a triangle that had never broken as long as the drug was absent: three who had merged into one. Then two pushed the drug away, but one grew weak and took it in-ever since, it has been tearing them all apart. Helplessness, pain, and a fading image of heaven follow. The central line records that his hero was defeated by the drug.

The poem does not state who forms the triangle. The obvious reading is: Tupac, his sister Sekyiwa, and his mother Afeni Shakur, who struggled with drug addiction in the 1980s. It remains an interpretation, but it is supported by the neighbouring poem: shortly before it in the book appears When Ure Hero Falls, dedicated “4 My Hero (My Mother)”—carrying the same image of the fallen hero.

The Unreconciled Precursor to “Dear Mama”

What Tupac captured here around the age of twenty in exclamation marks and despair, he later processed publicly. In Dear Mama, released in February 1995, he speaks openly about his mother’s addiction, but now with gratitude and reconciliation. The poem shows the earlier, unreconciled stage of that journey.

Set to Music by dead prez, Published by His Mother

On the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), it is interpreted by dead prez. There is no exact dating; according to the book’s preface, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991.

The fact that Afeni Shakur of all people published this book after his death and contributed a preface lends the text a special honesty: the family did not hide the poem.

More about the book and all poems in the introduction.