On November 30, 1994, while awaiting the verdict in a trial that had become a media frenzy, Tupac Shakur was confronted by three men in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. These men beat Tupac, stripped $40,000 worth of jewelry from his body, and shot him five times. The following day, he listened from a wheelchair as a jury convicted him of first-degree sexual abuse; he would eventually be sentenced to 18 months to four and a half years in prison. When he was freed some 11 months after the shooting, he was a different, more paranoid artist. The songs he released in the final year of his life seem to collapse the resolve and occasional optimism of his earlier work into a ball of nervous energy, Tupac lashing out where he once reached out. After his murder in the fall of 1996, the headline of his New York Times obituary called him a “rap performer who personified violence,” saying that during this final stage, his music’s “cautionary tone was gone” as “Mr. Shakur flaunted his success, reveling in fame and wealth.”
But this painfully shallow appraisal, and the others like it that soon followed, ignored the depth in Tupac’s later work. On the two albums he recorded for Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, the double-disc All Eyez On Me and the posthumously released The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, Tupac rapped at a breakneck pace, leaving in the numerous tics and mistakes that the younger artist would’ve scrubbed out of his final mixes. The agitation he felt during the final act of his life practically sweats through the records. He frequently sounds as if he’s about to fold in on himself, while reserving plenty of venomous scorn for his enemies—other rappers and industry figures, but also the elected officials targeting his communities.
Tupac Shakur: Wake Me When I’m Free, an immersive art installation and archival exhibit about the rapper’s life and career that is now open in downtown Los Angeles, is further proof that despite conventional wisdom, the rapper’s final albums were as politically potent as those that preceded them—and that they are inextricable from his lifelong ideological commitments. Shortly after you enter, you find yourself in a dark room illuminated only by videos depicting violence against Black people, often at the hands of the state. Audio from a 1992 interview with E! News, where Tupac explained why he was unconcerned about whether the violence and rage in his music would make white audiences uncomfortable—“What about when I felt uncomfortable for 400 years?”—is laid on top of this footage.
At points, the room is difficult to bear. The gamble Wake Me takes by placing it at the exhibit’s beginning is that Tupac’s reputation as an activist—and to some, a revolutionary—will have enough gravity to justify the use of such horrifying images. As it walks through Tupac’s life, from his mother’s incarceration to his own, from his early, coalition-building raps to his later, nearly misanthropic ones, Wake Me traces a few constants: a desire for Black Americans to be meaningfully liberated; a skepticism that the government would do anything but sabotage efforts toward that end; and a belief that the arts could be meaningful tools in that fight, whether as reportage or pure catharsis.
Tupac’s political education began in the womb. His mother, the political activist Afeni Shakur, named her son after an Incan ruler who tried and failed to stave off Spanish colonial armies in Peru; by the time he was in middle school, Tupac Shakur would be hounded by FBI agents who staked out his lunchroom, plying him for information about his stepfather, who was on their Ten Most Wanted list for much of the 1980s. (Wake Me spends significant time on Afeni, and on Tupac’s childhood around the Black Panthers. One sculpture is an oversized jar of peanut butter, a reminder of the role Tupac and other Panther kids played after Party meetings: smearing the substance over surfaces and doorknobs to stymie the federal agents who would come later, to dust for fingerprints.) In 1995, when Tupac was deposed as part of a civil suit holding he and Interscope Records responsible for the killing of a Texas state trooper by a young man who claimed songs on 2Pacalypse Now inspired the act, he said that the words “Black Power” were “like a lullaby” to him as a child.
As a child, Tupac immersed himself in the arts, reading Shakespeare, writing poetry, acting in school plays. It’s clear from the notebooks that he kept diligently throughout his life—many of which are on display as part of Wake Me—that he threw himself into music. Some of the early lyrics on display are rotely political (“I sit in history but I’m not learning anything/There’s just a paragraph about slavery & Dr. King”); others show a keen sense of the way rap music might be used as a political cudgel by conservatives in government. A page with lyrics to a song called “Get Tha Gauge,” dated to 1989, actually includes a disclaimer: “Composer’s Note: In no way is this song meant 2 stir up violence.” While Tupac’s first two albums were painted in court filings and in editorials as a call to arms for potentially murderous teenagers, his writing on them fits rather neatly into the lineage of Black American art and political writing, moving between rage at systemic oppressions, sober looks at their social consequences, and optimistic rallying cries. It’s also worth mentioning that, just weeks before his debut album hit shelves, two Oakland police officers stopped Tupac for jaywalking, then allegedly beat him. He sued for $10 million; the case was settled for $43,000.
The virtuosity and raw charisma Tupac displayed on those first two albums—and on screen in films like Juice, Poetic Justice, and Above the Rim—set him up to be a major crossover star. But in the fall of 1993, Tupac was arrested and charged with three counts of sodomy and two counts of sexual abuse stemming from an encounter in his hotel room. (He was also charged with illegal possession of a firearm.) Wake Me makes Tupac’s imprisonment nearly literal, leading guests past a series of empty cells whose borders are lined with the bureaucratic buildup of incarceration: a workout routine, forms requesting a “low fat/bland” diet. On the opposite wall are pieces of Tupac’s creative output during his eight months behind bars—a screenplay of thinly veiled autobiography (“a successful rapper at the peak of his career… set up for a crime he didn’t commit”) and correspondence from friends and collaborators, like the producer Johnny J, Tony Danza, and Quincy Jones, who sent him reading material. Perhaps because of the nature of his conviction, there is no attempt to frame Tupac as a political prisoner to any degree greater than the one to which all prisoners are political ones.
The exhibit’s slyest bit of commentary comes in the following room, which is dedicated to his year recording for Death Row. In October 1995, Suge Knight posted a $1.4 million bond to get Tupac out of Clinton Correctional in exchange for his signature on a hastily handwritten contract. Knight had a reputation for strong arming executives and artists—there’s the famous and apocryphal story of him dangling Vanilla Ice off a hotel balcony to secure “Ice Ice Baby” royalties—but later it would become clear that this label move was actually engineered by Interscope, whose parent company was in the midst of a merger and looking to distance itself from Tupac’s controversies.
In the 11 months between this bond posting and his assassination, Tupac worked doggedly, cutting hundreds of songs, many of which are frenzied, base, and vengeful. The curators of Wake Me stack dozens, perhaps hundreds of master reels from these recording sessions on top of one another, forming a giant, glassed-off wall, the physical proof of his productivity during the final year of his life. The exhibit doesn’t make any explicit allegations about Tupac’s time on Death Row or the predatory nature of his contract, but this wall is positioned in such a way that makes the viewer feel even more claustrophobic than the mock prison cells.
A viewer familiar with the songs buried in these stacks would recall the frantic, nearly breathless “Holla At Me,” or “Against All Odds,” where Tupac theorizes that his arrest was a setup by the feds, who he believed sent his co-defendants to entrap him. They might also think of “How Do U Want It,” which is mostly a lighthearted sex romp but includes jabs at Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and even the civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker, who was then publicly denouncing rap music; or The 7 Day Theory’s tender “To Live and Die in L.A.” where, in the midst of calls for unity between that city’s Black and Latino populations, Tupac laments that California governor Pete Wilson wanted to see both minority groups destitute. All this subtly reframes Tupac’s later work as protest music of a certain kind: eruptions from a man who sensed the walls closing in around him.
This is why the grisly images of that opening room feel of a piece with even his least overtly political work. Not all viewers will agree. Some of the clips—I think specifically of red blood from a gunshot wound pooling on a white t-shirt—are perhaps unnecessarily graphic in a work that already relies on the implication of violence, systemic and acute, happening just off screen. But this unsparing shock of reportage is exactly what Tupac is speaking about in voiceover. It is almost certainly the kind of provocation he would lean into if he were curating the room himself.