And we had to meet with the whole Digital Underground crew in San Francisco, at a Waffle House. I don’t know if you remember Raw Fusion it was DJ Fuze - the white DJ - and Money-B. When my brother and I first went up for our first music video, it was for a Digital Underground spinoff group. “We were his first image-makers and his first storyteller collaborators,” Hughes says. The resulting five-part docuseries, Dear Mama, begins airing on FX on April 21, and delves into the lives of both the hip-hop icon and his equally outspoken, socially conscious mother. But the Shakur family said something that changed his mind: “To know Tupac, to love Tupac, was to fight with Tupac.” So Hughes decided to reveal the Tupac he’d known: a poet, a political firebrand, and the son of a Black Panther, Afeni Shakur, who herself contained multitudes. “I didn’t want to go back there,” he says. Sure, the Defiant Ones filmmaker and his brother, Albert, had co-directed Shakur’s first music videos Hughes had also been violently attacked by Shakur and his entourage in the early Nineties. Sampa the Great’s latest album, As Above, So Below, is out now.WHEN TUPAC SHAKUR’S estate approached Allen Hughes to make a documentary about the iconic rapper, Hughes said thanks, but no. Whenever 2Pac’s Changes comes on, it’s a reminder to stay true to expressing myself. It’s important for people to know what inspired the live show they’ve just seen – what inspired me to take on hip-hop. We stay on stage while it plays and experience it with the crowd. This year we’ve been ending all our Sampa the Great concerts by playing Changes. He never got to achieve that, but luckily I still have that opportunity. Tupac wanted to start his own label and put more of his peers forward – and that’s where I am now. I’d always ask myself: “How would Tupac feel?” That resonated with me on a micro level when I started out making music in Australia, trying to bring my culture and music to the forefront. It wasn’t just the song I fell in love with I was immensely inspired by who Tupac was – the good, the bad and the ugly – and how he was able to navigate being a black rap superstar in the United States, in a country that was really scared of that. And that was another note for myself: regardless of where I’m from, what language I speak or which culture I belong to, the human experience always resonates. I want to go back to the days when we were happier, when there was less pressure and it was lighter on my family.” Because Tupac was expressing human experiences, it made me connect. There’s a line in the song that goes “Things’ll never be the same” and as a kid you just think “Damn, I guess this is life as we know it. When I listened to it in my adolescence, I was starting to really see what adulthood was about and the experiences my parents were having – of having children from a different country being raised in Botswana, not fitting in, and how hard it was on them. He opens with “I see no changes”, this hopelessness, and takes us on a journey. You’re supposed to display bravado and strength. It was unusual for a male hip-hop artist to talk about their doubts and fears. On Changes, I resonated with Tupac’s vulnerability. Lyrically, I connect with artists who talk about what’s happening in their lives.
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