Kevin Powell New Book Includes Time With Tupac Shakur

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Oct 27, 2015
3 min read

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Kevin Powell was a writer for Vibe Magazine during the tumultuous times of hip hop's height of rap beef when the east and west coast rivalry was at its fever pitch. He also happened to be friends with one of hip hop's most iconic figures such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

He has recently released a new book that includes a memoir of interacting with the hip hop giants entitled "The Education of Kevin Powell". Below is an excerpt from the book via Complex Music!

Chapter 25: Tupac and Me A few weeks after the video shoot I spoke to Tupac again. Apparently, much had changed in Tupac’s mind since our last conversation about a year before. He told me how angry he was, and with everyone. But he said that he could trust Suge Knight and the Death Row family to protect him from his enemies. I remember hanging up the phone after that interview, on December 2, 1995, and feeling sick. Tupac had displayed a side of himself, a darker, more menacing side, that made me think, Damn, maybe I never really knew him. I didn’t want to speak to Tupac Shakur anymore. I guess a part of me knew it was only a matter of time before he would get his wish and be gone from us forever. I never stopped following Tupac’s life, though, and whenever I heard someone mention his name, I listened as carefully as I had in 1992.

Tupac was me, and I was him, ghetto children from birth, living until it was our turn to die. So, in a way, the “new” Tupac made me feel as if I had lost a friend, and that I couldn’t do anything about it. He was gone.

Around that time I also spoke with Snoop Dogg in person—he was more paranoid than ever—a nervous Dr. Dre, and finally Suge Knight, who gave me the most bizarre interview of my career. In his overly air-conditioned office with red carpet and gigantic Deathrow logo in its center Knight kept his very big dog Damu (which meant “blood” in Swahili) with him the entire time and lectured me sternly about the questions that he did not like.

As I got into my rental car that night, I was shocked to see Faith Evans, The Notorious B.I.G.’s wife, in a car. Why was she there? Was Tupac having an affair with Biggie’s wife, as he claimed? I decided to leave Faith out of my piece to avoid adding more fuel to this fire. A few days later I spoke with Tupac by phone and he was short, tense, and mumbled things about M&M peanuts of different colors not going together, so why should East Coast and West Coast go together? I sighed to myself a few times as I listened to Tupac’s rant.

This was a year after he had admitted his many flaws, vowed to be a better person, and even said that he should have stopped the men in his hotel room from sexually assaulting a woman there. The woman charged him with the attack, which he adamantly denied, saying that the sex was consensual. I hung up the phone from that latest conversation with Tupac Shakur not knowing what to believe or what to do.