What of Fame?

Three lines and a question in the title: that was all Tupac needed for What of Fame?. The piece is among the shortest poems in The Rose That Grew from Concrete. In the book’s first part, it stands directly before The Shining Star Within!, which Tupac dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, and Starry Night for Vincent van Gogh. Together, the three form a small series on fame and its price.

Three Lines Between Promise and Threat

The poem describes celebrity in three concise statements: Everyone knows your face. The world screams your name. And you are never alone again. Nothing more is written there.

The power lies in the ambiguity of the final line. Never being alone again can sound like a promise: the end of loneliness, which Tupac laments in poems like Sometimes I Cry. But it can also be a threat: no refuge anymore, no privacy, constant scrutiny. The question in the title leaves open which reading is meant.

Written Before the Breakthrough, Read in the Light of 1996

According to the preface, the poems in the book were written between 1989 and 1991-before Tupac became known through Digital Underground, his first album, and film roles. Today, What of Fame? is read almost inevitably in the light of what followed: a life under permanent public scrutiny that ended in Las Vegas in 1996.

This reading is an interpretation from today’s perspective; while writing it, Tupac could have known nothing about that. What is documented is only that the subject occupied him as a teenager-and primarily as a danger.

On the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), Russell Simmons speaks the poem.

More on the book and all poems in the introduction.