Usually, only hindsight is 20/20 but Tupac Amaru Shakur was blessed with clear vision from the start. Today would have been his 49th birthday, and a brilliant time and place to recognize his masterpiece, “Changes.”
Even the very name given to him was with purpose – José Gabriel Túpac Amaru was the brave indigenous leader of a 3-year-long Peruvian rebellion against Spanish colonization. As active Black Panthers, both of his parents were well educated on the global plight of people of color fighting oppression. His mother Afeni, former editor of the Black Panthers newsletter, explained, “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.”
And so many of 2Pac’s songs now seem like his fulfillment of that purpose, but none more so than “Changes. It happens so fast that you’re already anticipating what comes next, but when you listen today, pay close attention to the opening line. “I see no changes, wake up in the morning and I ask myself / Is life worth livin’? Should I blast myself?” 2Pac immediately speaks to the festering wound that American society happily ignores: the ongoing generational trauma inflicted by slavery and systemic racism. Everything that follows in the song is a result of either the wound or the weapon.
Recorded in 1992, less than a year after Rodney King was brutalized by the LAPD, 2Pac’s song was an anomaly in an industry and society where rappers used to be treated like the lowest common denominator. Here, he demonstrated this uncanny ability to observe his surroundings, understand them in a broader context, and then transform those emotions and truths into intelligent, relatable rhymes unlike anyone before. It was one of the world’s earliest and most public lessons that even a rapper can be a Renaissance man.
More than just his work of art, “Changes” is such a scathing, insightful, and moving indictment of the modern day oppression visited on black Americans and other people of color that even the Vatican recognized 2Pac’s posthumous hit song among its 12 global favorites back in 2009.
Shakespeare once asked, “What’s in a name?” If our contemporary poet 2Pac is any indication, the answer, dear Juliet, might just be “Everything.”
𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗦 𝗧𝗢 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘:
“Instead of war on poverty
They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me”