"Inside the Mind of Shakur": Tupac on VIBE Online (June 1996)

Original: “Inside the Mind of Shakur,” part 1 of an interview series · VIBE Online · 1996 (June 1996 according to Vibe’s book) · interviewer not named

When and where

This interview did not run in the print magazine but on VIBE Online, the magazine’s then-new website. It was the first part of a series called “Inside the Mind of Shakur.” The archived text does not name the interviewer. The date “06/1996” matches the book Vibe’s editors published about Tupac in 1998: it reprints passages from the conversation and dates one quote to June 1996. According to the text, Tupac is sitting in the living room of his apartment in front of a big-screen TV.

Where Tupac stood in summer 1996

All Eyez on Me had been out since February 13, and Tupac was Death Row’s biggest star. On June 4, 1996, “Hit ‘Em Up” was released, his open attack on Biggie and Bad Boy. The editors frame the interview with a question: had Tupac matured after prison?

What they talked about

What drives him? Poverty, needs and pain, Tupac says, plus a “military” mindset he wants to combine with street life. He says he believed his father was dead all his life. Only after the 1994 shooting did a man show up who looked exactly like him (Billy Garland). There has been no blood test, and he says he is past the father question. What matters to him is something else: young people raising each other, with the older ones acting as role models for the younger.

The youth organization with Mike Tyson that he had announced in Vibe is now happening with Death Row, he says. He mentions the Los Angeles program “A Place Called Home” and a “Celebrity Youth League” in which he, Hammer, Suge Knight and athletes would sponsor youth teams.

He has no friends anymore, only family. He learned that “on the floor at Times Square”: fear is stronger than love.

God, the church and a queen

Tupac spends the longest stretch on religion. He prays every night, but considers the Bible a human creation and criticizes lavish churches in poor neighborhoods. He also takes on the teachings of the Five Percenters, which he encountered in prison. In the end he lays out his own faith:

“I believe God blesses those that hustle.” Tupac Shakur, VIBE Online, 1996

He describes heaven as sleeping with a clear conscience and hell as a nightmare in which you see your own deeds over and over. Asked what kind of woman could settle him down, he says he always falls in love with the woman someone could become. Having made himself a “king” of his own life, he is now looking for a “queen.”

East versus West

He calls the charge that he betrayed the East Coast nonsense. He has lived in the West for years, he says, devoted a whole song on Me Against the World to New York and got Biggie his first shows. There never was a real beef, only a lack of respect. Anyone who loves music, he argues, should compare the styles before and after the two of them met. He portrays the Bad Boy camp as rattled:

“I’m alive; the ghost is walking around.” Tupac Shakur, VIBE Online, 1996

Why it matters

The interview sits between Tupac’s two major Vibe conversations of 1996 (February, November). It is more reflective than “Hit ‘Em Up” and at the same time full of challenges. His lines about God, heaven and hell were quoted often after his death, including on the cover copy of Vibe’s 1998 book.