"I Am Not a Gangster": Tupac in the Los Angeles Times (October 1995)

Original: “Q & A with Tupac Shakur: ‘I Am Not a Gangster’” · Los Angeles Times, Calendar section · Chuck Philips · October 25, 1995

When and where

This interview is often dated August 25, 1995. That cannot be right: in August Tupac was still behind bars. The piece ran in the Los Angeles Times on October 25, 1995. Chuck Philips, who covered the music business for the paper, met Tupac “six days after his release”around October 18, in the dim control room of a recording studio in Tarzana, the Can-Am Studios where Death Row was cutting records at the time.

On October 12, Death Row had posted a $1.4 million bond so Tupac could leave the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, while he appealed. The Times wrote Rikers Island, but he had served most of his sentence at Dannemora. He had been convicted of sexual abuse over a 1993 incident in a Manhattan hotel. His lawyers had told him not to discuss the case, and he didn’t.

Where Tupac stood in fall 1995

He was 24 and coming off a year that would have filled several lives: shot five times at Quad Studios in New York in November 1994, then the trial, then prison. Meanwhile Me Against the World had entered the charts at No. 1 while he was locked up, and “Dear Mama” had become a Top 10 single. In Texas, a civil suit claimed his early songs shared blame for the killing of a state trooper.

In the studio he played Philips his brand-new duet with Snoop Doggy Dogg, “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”according to the article already the 14th song since his release. He and producer Johnny “J” were working “till people start passing out.” The sessions became the double album All Eyez on Me a few months later.

What they talked about

Philips asked about prison, the shooting and the “gangsta rapper” label. Tupac said the jokes late-night hosts made about his wounds had hurt, and that letters from fans, mothers and kids had kept him going, even actor Tony Danza wrote to him. He admitted to mistakes of his own and said he was ready to move on.

The heart of the interview is his rejection of the gangster image:

“Let me say for the record, I am not a gangster and never have been.” Tupac Shakur, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1995

He was no thief and no thug, he said, just “a brother who fights back”an artist with a job. Violence showed up in his songs because it showed up in life. And gangs were everywhere: he listed the FBI, the ATF, police departments, churches and both major parties, each with its own clique.

Shakespeare and “Dear Mama”

What bothered him most was that his quieter songs went unnoticed. He pointed to Don McLean’s “Vincent” as the kind of lyric he wanted to write and talked about his years at the Baltimore School for the Arts. He read Romeo and Juliet as a story of two rival gangs and Macbeth as a tale of seduction and madness. Pressed on his language about women, he deflected, but stressed that he always played new music for his mother, Afeni Shakur, first, he wrote “Dear Mama” because he felt he owed her “something deep.”

Why it matters

This was Tupac’s first major newspaper interview after prison and the first to present him as a Death Row artist. “I am not a gangster” became one of his most quoted lines. Chuck Philips stayed with the story: after Tupac’s death he wrote several widely debated investigative pieces for the Times about the 1994 and 1996 shootings.

Read more: The 1994 shooting · MTV interview, October 1995