Words for My Comrades: A Political History 2024 of Tupac Shakur by Dean Van Nguyen

Product Name: Words for My Comrades: A Political History 2024 of Tupac Shakur by Dean Van Nguyen
EAN：9781399615440 UPC：9781399615440 ISBN：9781399615440 MPN：N/A 2024 Format：Paperback, 464 pages
Before his murder at twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the pre-eminent storyteller of the 90s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded several platinum-selling albums, starred in major films and became an activist and political hero known the world over.In this cultural history and brilliantly researched biography, Dean Van Nguyen reckons with Tupacs coming of age, fame and influence and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprising. Words for My Comrades crucially engages with the influence of Tupacs mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party, with its dedication to dismantling American imperialism and police brutality, informed Tupacs art. Tupacs childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his militant stepfather Mutulu Shakur, became his own riveting code of ethics that helped listeners reckon with Americas inherent injustices.Drawing upon conversations with the people who bore witness - from Panther veterans and other committed Marxist revolutionaries of 1970s America, to good friends and close collaborators of the rapper himself - Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics. Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture and how America produced, in Tupac and Afeni, two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries..