Ready to Live (Part 5): Plans After Prison

Original: “Ready to Live” (Part 5) · Vibe · Kevin Powell · April 1995

From his cell, Tupac Shakur announced an about-face: “Thug Life” was dead to him, he had lived it long enough. In the fifth and final part of Kevin Powell’s Vibe interview (April 1995), the 23-year-old draws a line under the past and looks ahead-shortly before his release and move to Death Row.

Plans from the Cell: Rescue Instead of the Streets

After prison, Tupac said, he wanted to team up with Mike Tyson and author Sanyika Shakur, formerly known as gang member “Monster Kody.” Together, they planned an organization called “Us First” to save young men. Nobody had saved him.

40 Letters, Apologies, and the Comparison to Van Gogh

He drew support from around 40 letters he received while incarcerated, and from people who stood by him: Jada Pinkett, Jasmine Guy, Treach, Mickey Rourke, his record label Interscope, and Madonna, whom he had previously snubbed. He apologized to Quincy Jones for past remarks about his marriages, and likewise to the Hughes brothers. He pointedly excluded John Singleton, because Singleton had dropped him from Higher Learning.

He had no fear of death, he said; rappers had to take more responsibility for their lyrics. He compared himself to Marvin Gaye and Vincent van Gogh, whose work was only appreciated after death. In closing, he said he was 23, wanted to pull himself out of the dirt, and make proud everyone who had written him off: “I’m going to show them the man that my mother raised.”

$1.4 Million Bail: What Became of the Resolutions

The resolutions didn’t last long. In October 1995, Suge Knight got Tupac out of prison on $1.4 million bail. Tupac signed with Death Row and acted tougher than before, the “Thug Life” tattoo always on display. “Us First” was never founded. The friendship with Mike Tyson remained: after Tyson’s fight in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996, Tupac was shot.

Yet some things from the conversation did come to pass. He made peace with Quincy Jones’s family; in 1996, he was dating Jones’s daughter Kidada. As for Tupac being dropped from Higher Learning, according to Singleton that was actually a studio decision, as the studio refused to finance the film with him following his arrest.

And the comparison to Van Gogh took on a bitter twist: after his death, more Tupac albums were released than during his lifetime, and his work is valued more highly today than it was back then.

Read more

• Part 1: The interview on Rikers Island
• Part 4: Tupac’s view of the trial
• Readers’ letters to Vibe
• “All Eyes”Tupac a year later at Death Row