Tupac: Resurrection
dir. Lazin
Opens Fri Nov 14
Various Theaters
Please don’t shoot me for saying this, but I really never cared for Tupac as a rapper. He made no real contribution to the form itself, and outside of a few rather maudlin songs about his mother, or being a complex thug, he had nothing in the way of a developed worldview in the manner of, say, Rakim, or Chuck D, or Ice Cube. The success of the documentary Tupac: Resurrection (which attempts to do nothing less than produce a saint from MTV videos, news reports, and intimate interviews) focuses less on his music, and more on his actual life–his childhood in New York, his teens in Baltimore, his early 20s in the Bay Area, and, finally, the transformation of this ordinary life into a pop life.
Narrated by Tupac himself as if from the grave (“I always knew I was gonna be shot”), the most important revelation the documentary has to offer is that Tupac was not a thug to begin with, but something of a geek who took ballet lessons, read Shakespeare, and wrote poetry in notebooks. His troubles with the law, which didn’t begin until he was famous, were not a consequence of his upbringing but an invented gangster personality that the police mistook for the real thing. Ultimately, it did become the real thing, because Tupac died a real death in the most unreal city of the world.