1996-12484 words · 2 min
"All Eyez on Him": RJ Smith's SPIN Essay on a Divided Star
White mockery, Black grief: In December 1996, RJ Smith asks in SPIN why Tupac touched people so differently. A smart, hard-hitting essay.
Original: “All Eyez on Him” · SPIN · RJ Smith · December 1996
On the night before Tupac’s death, a lounge singer in Las Vegas spots a young Black man with a bald head in the audience, shouts “a miracle!” and has the band play California Love. Hours later, Tupac is dead. Between the mockery of this white entertainer and the grief of Black fans outside the hospital lies the subject of RJ Smith’s essay: hardly any pop star meant such different things to such different people. It is the longest story about Tupac in the archive, and one of the smartest.
Thug Life for White People, Exodus on His Back
White people mostly knew the “Thug Life” tattoo; hardly anyone knew about the Bible verse Exodus 18:11 on his back. Voices such as the rapper E-40, the writer Paul Beatty, and the soul musician Swamp Dogg describe a man full of pain and contradictions. Beatty puts it in a nutshell: “He’s a person you recognize.” Smith lists the rumors after the murder, from Bloods versus Crips to “he is alive,” and pans the video for I Ain’t Mad at Cha as sentimental kitsch.
In the Shadow of Suge Knight: A Deal With No Way Out
The final third deals with origins and dependency: his Panther mother, stepfather Mutulu Shakur, godfather Geronimo Pratt, the move to Marin City in 1988, and Afeni’s crack addiction. Smith recalls Thanksgiving 1995, when Death Row handed out turkeys in South Central and Tupac stood in the shadow of Suge Knight. His conclusion: “His best performance was as a man who made a deal he couldn’t undo.”
Geronimo Pratt Walked Free, the Makaveli Album Was Released
Smith’s facts are solid, his judgment deliberately sharp. He calls Tupac’s rap technique “leaden,” for example, which many critics and fans see differently. Some points have developed further since then: Geronimo Pratt, who in 1996 was still serving a life sentence, walked free in 1997 because the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence. Mutulu Shakur was released on parole, gravely ill, in December 2022 and died in July 2023.
The rumor about an album called Makaveli was half right: The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was released on November 5, 1996, under this name, but showed a painted crucifixion scene on the cover, not a photo. Smith’s observation that myths immediately formed around Tupac’s death was confirmed: the “he is alive” theories persist stubbornly, even though the autopsy and investigations are conclusive.
His Mother Overcame Her Addiction and Managed His Work
The passages about Afeni Shakur need to be supplemented: she had overcome her addiction in the early nineties; Tupac honored her for this in 1995 in Dear Mama. From 1997 onwards, she managed her son’s work until her death in 2016.