#16: Tupac by Guest Blogger Mr. Focus

Okay people here is the deal. Several folks have contacted me about taking over the website. Since I can’t decide who I want to take over the website, I will post the entries as they come. Based on the responses I will decide which person gets to take over the website. Enjoy this entry by Mr. Focus!

Let’s be honest: Tupac is the Elvis Presley for ghetto people.

Why? The man is dead as dead could be, but there are folks who pray to a Tupac altar in their house every day, keep an airbrushed shirt on their back, and look for all the subliminal instructions he left for them in his music as they wait with bated breath for Makaveli 10 to hit the bootleg man’s stock. Tupac is the rap Jesus ghetto people needed.

Once a conscious rapper of sorts, debuting with Digital Underground as a dancer, then rapping in African garb, Tupac Shakur morphed slowly but surely into the embodiment of all things hood. Tattoos in places that will have you rejected at job interviews. Wearing wifebeaters all the time with a bandana tied just so up front and the mustache lined to perfection. Brash, extremely vulgar, hypertense, with a fuse shorter than the circuit breaker in the back of a building on Martin Luther King Blvd.

And after “I Get Around,” ghetto people ate it up. Every Walkman, every radio and video show, every apartment, every Tercel and Tahoe had to get it in to the tune of three Pac songs an hour. He made you love your mama and keep an eye on your baby mama all at once. Catholic school girls were his groupies and guys who were nerds in middle school had their thug bars up in time for tenth grade with a Pac record as the textbook. There’s incense and energy drinks named after him and the whole shot. Tupac is a billion-dollar industry.

Not to mention think of how many fights and shootings broke out in house parties, classrooms, clubs, and on street corners across America. Over a damn rapper. Even if it was simply the mention of Biggie Smalls’ name when that rabid Tupac freak was in the room. You’re probably closing your closet door to hide your swap meet airbrushed, bedazzled Pac shirts right now as you read this. And you should, because it’s that shameful.

UPDATE:  Thinking everything was just jokes about the 2Pac energy drinks, as I’m sure you were, it turns out one really exists, as told by this candid liquor store photo:

As Sade would ask, is it a crime?