Mopreme Shakur on Tupac: The sensitive man behind the music

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0:30Mopreme Shakur:How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

0:50Mopreme Shakur:Hello, I'm Shaima Khalil, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. the best conversations coming out of the BBC with people shaping our world from all over the world. I want to get freedom. I like that freedom. A gender-equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this is fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end.

1:23Mopreme Shakur:For this episode, I speak to Mupreem Shakur, stepbrother of iconic rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot dead in Las Vegas in 1996. Now, almost 30 years later, Dwayne Keefe D. Davis is on trial in connection with his murder. He's pleaded not guilty. Through music that explores poverty, racism and injustice, Tupac became one of hip-hop's most loved and influential figures, selling more than 75 million records worldwide. Moprim Shakur explains what it was like growing up with Tupac and how he believes the hardship they experienced shaped both his brother and the music he went on to make.

2:01Shaimaa Khalil:I think Pac was actually traumatized by the poverty. Poverty can be very, very traumatic. You know, having no lights, having no food from time to time, having no clothes while you're going to school, got to go to school every day in bummy clothes. Them stories, I know people have probably heard them stories from different people, but it was real. It really happened to Pac. Pac was sensitive, so he felt all those things deeply.

2:42Mopreme Shakur:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Moprim Shakur.

2:48Shaimaa Khalil:My father said, that's your brother. He didn't say, that's your stepbrother. He said, that's your brother. That's what I knew, and that's the way it was.

2:57Mopreme Shakur:What was it like being Tupac's brother, especially that you say your earliest memory is of being told to hold his hand? Did you feel like you had a sense of responsibility for that little guy?

3:09Shaimaa Khalil:Absolutely. Absolutely felt a sense of responsibility because I was six. He was two. I was thrilled to have a little brother. It was special, you know. Like, oh, wow, he's watching me now. He's watching what I do. He wants what I want. He want to go where I go.

3:28Mopreme Shakur:What was Tupac like as a little guy?

3:31Shaimaa Khalil:He was fun. He was energetic. He could be aggressive sometimes. And, you know, he was sensitive. You know, we would play fight all the time. And if I hit him too hard, he was seriously upset. He was seriously mad and seriously wanted to fight. You hit me harder than you're supposed to. It wasn't part of the game. Now we got to fight. Sense of justice. Yeah, sense of justice, exactly.

3:58Mopreme Shakur:Tell me about Tupac's mother, what she went through.

4:01Shaimaa Khalil:Pag's mom, the late great Mr. Fanny Shakur, is an icon in the black nationalist civil rights movement. She was a member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party. She did a lot of good work up in Harlem. While my father was working at Lincoln Detail's clinic, Fanny was helping with tenants rights in the Bronx in Harlem. people still to this day have their places because of her work. Our family has always been deeply trenched in the health and welfare of the community. They're healers, you know, healers and caretakers of our communities, which now, back then, was heavily neglected. You know, She was just trying to take care of people.

4:55Shaimaa Khalil:She was highly intelligent, a clue for everybody. That mouth that Pac had came from her.

5:01Mopreme Shakur:To her last day, she was quite vocal about what happened to Tupac and justice for Tupac. How do you think she would have felt at this moment when this is going to trial? I think she would be encouraged.

5:18Shaimaa Khalil:you know because before she passed she was kind of heartbroken that nothing had been done she uh tried the best she could to to deal with the situation she was thrown into the situation she wasn't in the music business you know not only having to now handle Pac's business she had to deal with her own loss her own trauma and still maintain the business and still try to get justice It was a lot.

5:48Mopreme Shakur:And you talk a lot about the dynamic between you two in the family that, you know, you when he was fire, you were ice, you complemented each other that the mannerisms complemented each other. Yes. And I'm just wondering, what did the world not see behind Tupac's fire? How was he misunderstood?

6:11Shaimaa Khalil:I think my brother felt a sense of responsibility that he was the man of the house. And his mother and his sister needed help. Once my brother and I were reconnected, reunited, and I had just entered the music business, I think he felt hope. He was inspired. And he was like, that's the ticket. And we were blessed with opportunities. and we took full advantage of them. Once we got on, once Pop got successful, it was nonstop. You know, we're from the streets. You know what I mean? We grew up around drug dealers, hustlers, and, you know, we knew how to hustle. Both of us from New York. So we got to hustling.

6:58Shaimaa Khalil:Tried not to never be broke again.

7:00Mopreme Shakur:Do you think the music and the success was your way out of the poverty or was it a way to express what was going on at the time, injustices, abandonment?

7:14Shaimaa Khalil:It was both. It was both because music is also a tool to deal with stress and pain and the need to express yourself, and that was also needed as well. The type of struggles we were going through, and our family in particular were going through, it was very helpful and useful and therapeutic. I think Pac was actually traumatized by the poverty. Poverty can be very, very traumatic. You know, having no lights, having no food from time to time, having no clothes while you're going to school, got to go to school every day in bummy clothes. Them stories, I know people have probably heard them stories from different people, but it was real.

8:10Shaimaa Khalil:It really happened to Pac. Pac, like I said, Pac was sensitive, so he felt all those things deeply. He was blessed with the gift of being able to express himself and make people feel it. That's the whole key to music. That's the whole, you can't see it, can't touch it, music, you know. It got to make people feel you through your words, through your speech, through how you express yourself as well. And how believable the listener thinks you are. People often listen to music to feel comfort that someone knows where you're coming from. And Pac was able to do that. and as we all know there's a lot of poor disenfranchised people around the world of all shapes and colors and genders.

9:07Shaimaa Khalil:So that's what we that's where we're from. My father was a doctor. I mean he was an acupuncture doctor but there was no he didn't discriminate with patients. We're humanitarians first. We come from healers. From healing the body to healing the community and that's what that was the you know the effort you mentioned poverty but

9:32Mopreme Shakur:I also want to want to go into something that you mentioned in the book which is abandonment and you you talk about you know the abandoned the unloved they're the ones that turn into the monsters that then everyone fears and and of course you know the hate that you give the little ones.

9:50Shaimaa Khalil:No matter who it is when you grow and up in those types of communities what's often missed and not talked about a lot is nurturing. The nurturing of a young human, a young kid, a young child. The nurturing so that child will grow into something beautiful and do beautiful things but if you don't have that nurturing it's actually neglect that hardens them little ones that that hardens them little ones in a way that can be detrimental in their adulthood is that the real meaning behind that

10:31Mopreme Shakur:thug's life that this is a person that was abandoned so he became hardened do you think that was the switch then for Tupac for you?

10:43Shaimaa Khalil:It's all part of the biggest story. You know, that is just one hurt. That was just one of the hurdles that we had to overcome to make it. You know, a lot of Pac's early work dealt with a lot of social issues and that's really where we're from.

10:58Mopreme Shakur:When did that switch happen between Tupac talking about social justice, about what was facing young black people and then switching to thug life.

11:09Shaimaa Khalil:Well, that's how it started. His whole career musically started with dealing with social issues because that's where we're from. The first one was Brenda's Got a Baby, Keep Your Head Up, Papa Song. A lot of those songs, his early work dealt with social issues. It was always there. But what was also happening was that Pac was a young man becoming a man. He was a young man growing into his manhood, which, you know, it takes to innocence. You know, we were realizing that, you know, a lot of the positive messages wasn't resonating like we wanted to. We were getting older. We started losing friends, allies.

12:03Shaimaa Khalil:And as we grew older, we had to adapt the message to reach the older, more hardened people in our orbit.

12:13Mopreme Shakur:But you could also sense that Tupac was getting angrier and angrier. Oh, yeah.

12:18Shaimaa Khalil:Yeah. Because, like I said, as it grew, as we developed, we learned more and became angrier. You know, there was a lot of things to be angrier. You know, a lot of kids and their teens are not familiar with politics or aware of politics or, you know, they're living their lives trying to live there. But when you reach adulthood and you start dealing with adult issues and, you know, and understand more things that are going on in your community that are wrong, you get angrier. You get angrier. He got angrier. angrier and you know we we chose to deal with it through thug life for example Bill Clinton was president at the time and he was establishing the crime bill my father was incarcerated and we were free and we were seeing what we're going to happen because us coming from black and brown communities we felt like they were targeting us.

13:28Shaimaa Khalil:Any slight of a crime, anything that might look like a crime, you know, the black and brown people were going to get arrested, accosted, thrown in jail, and we felt targeted. So the Thug Light Project was to raise awareness, create unity between amongst our, we felt was our communities, black and brown, poor disenfranchised political prisoners of all shapes and colors internationally. That's why our movement resonated kind of internationally.

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15:15Mopreme Shakur:You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service with me, Shaima Khalil. I came to journalism through hip-hop and DJing. Tupac's music was part of my own teenage years. What's your DJ name? Moprim quickly asks. Um, DJ Shaim, I say a little reluctantly, not wanting to oversell my modest DJ career to hip-hop royalty. This was really the tone of our conversation. Music and laughter, love and grief, and an absence that time has done very little to diminish. With the trial approaching, Moprim was understandably cautious. He was reluctant to discuss the evidence in detail or say anything that might affect the case.

15:56Mopreme Shakur:But he did want to talk about Tupac, not the global icon, but his little brother. Moprim's memoir is called This Thug's Life. And the moment I mentioned the words thug life, he lets out a laugh. Thug life, baby, he says. It was, of course, the name of the hip-hop group that he and Tupac belonged to alongside other artists. These two words were also famously tattooed across Tupac's torso. Moprim tells me what thug life meant to him, to his brother, and to their community. It was never simply about being a gangster. It was the idea that the hatred, poverty, and violence inflicted on children would eventually affect society as a whole.

16:38Mopreme Shakur:This, he tells me, is what shaped Tupac's art. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Moprim Shakur. I want to talk about the last couple of years of Tupac's life, because it was the height of his career, but it was also the height of a lot of beef, especially the East Coast, West Coast, which is now universally known, but that then translated into real life violence. as a brother watching this tell me about that time in Tupac's life in your life

17:15Shaimaa Khalil:it was tumultuous um there was a lot of beefs and like I said Pac would Pac had a sensitivity so which in turn made him even angrier. I was really frustrated with him about thinking about Biggie so much. I'm like, you're the king. You're the Don. You're the king of rap. You're a movie star, for Christ's sake. Stop worrying about this dude. And then 1996 is the year he gets killed.

17:50Mopreme Shakur:I want to take you back to that very difficult night. What do you remember about it? How did you hear about it?