![]() ![]() I really think that war going to keep going on, frustration going to keep going on, anger going to keep going on, until we finally go back down to the simplest word: love." When are we going to understand that we are put on earth to love?. "It's frustrating to know what he said is hard to comprehend," Lamar said in a Konbini video, in which he was asked to listen to and respond to Shakur's "Changes." "He's saying everything that we saying today. "It's time for us as a people to start making some changes/ Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live/ And let's change the way we treat each other" - Tupac Shakur, "Changes" These issues still appear on the most urgent hip-hop albums, such as Run the Jewels' chaotic dissertations, Beyoncé's divisive Lemonade or Kendrick Lamar's 2Pac-indebted To Pimp a Butterfly. ![]() These issues stand at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has made its presence felt in this election cycle. The same issues Shakur discusses in "Changes" - racial inequality and systemic violence both at home and abroad, the discriminatory nature of poverty - stood at the core of this year's presidential debates. Politics have started to catch up and turn these lyrics into national conversations. Shakur was years ahead of his time, as all visionary artists are. None of this is to say there hasn't been progress. But if the way they respond to those terms is to open the White House to a Drumf regime, it's clear racism in America is not " over." "And although it seems heaven-sent," he spits in the second verse, "We ain't ready to see a black president." Voters did manage to re-elect Barack Obama twice. "It's war on the streets and a war in the Middle East," he raps out of the gate on the third and most cutting verse of "Changes." "Instead of war on poverty/ They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me."Įlsewhere in the song: "The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks." The stats play out. ![]() That joke makes it easier to come to terms with how mystically prescient Shakur's observations have remained. Dave Chappelle satirized the myth in one of the best skits from his lost episodes Clickhole flipped the joke on another gangster rapper brilliant 2014 article. According to the myth, Shakur, sick of the game, faked his own death and went underground where he's continued to record undisturbed. Hip-hop's best inside joke is that Shakur never died. ![]()
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