Tupac Against The World: The Rebel Poet Who Made Hip-Hop A Weapon of Truth

FEW artists have ever carried the weight of resistance, rage, and vulnerability as powerfully as Tupac Amaru Shakur. Born Lesane Parish Crooks, renamed in honour of an Indigenous revolutionary, and raised within the political fire of the Black Liberation struggle, 2Pac was never just a rapper—he was a mirror to America’s contradictions and a megaphone for its oppressed.

Dean Van Nguyen’s book situates Shakur exactly where he belongs: not in the pantheon of mere entertainers, but in the long line of revolutionary artists who made music an act of defiance. Nguyen describes him with surgical accuracy: “Tupac cut into America’s heart of darkness with surgical precision. He had the eloquence to illustrate oppression, the charisma to make people listen, and the musical chops to filter it all through the tight margins of a rap song.”

That sentence could serve as his epitaph. By the time he was killed at just 25, Tupac had already recorded a body of work that reads like a syllabus in political education: capitalism, racism, police brutality, COINTELPRO, imperialism, war. He instinctively grasped the obscenity of inequality, once remarking in frustration that there was “no way Michael Jackson… should have a million-thousand-druple-billion dollars and then there’s people starving.” His lyrics gave voice to that outrage, mixing righteous indignation with compassion for the downtrodden.

Yet his genius lay in contradiction. 2Pac was at once the poet of tenderness (“Dear Mama”, “Keep Ya Head Up”) and the prophet of rage (“Trapped”, “Holler If Ya Hear Me”). He exalted women while also falling into the misogynistic language that plagued hip-hop culture. He preached unity through the Code of Thug Life, even as his affiliations with Suge Knight and gang politics pulled him deeper into cycles of violence. He rejected the label of “gangsta rapper,” insisting instead on being seen as an artist documenting oppression—but his art was often consumed through the very stereotypes he sought to dismantle.

Nguyen does not shy away from Tupac’s complexities. The book lingers on his trial and conviction for sexual assault, exposing how flawed the verdict was, yet also forcing us to grapple with the dissonance between his political advocacy for Black women and the toxic patterns of masculinity he never fully escaped. This duality haunts his legacy: a revolutionary voice shaped by—and at times complicit in—the culture he sought to change.

Still, his influence reverberates across movements. From Irish republican anthems to Libyan freedom songs, Tupac’s words transcend geography. His politics, forged by a mother who stood trial as a Panther and beat the state by defending herself in court, remain radical in their clarity. He saw through the cult of Donald Trump when others glorified him, and he warned against precisely the capitalist illusions that now dominate hip-hop.

Would he have “sold out” like other rap moguls, or would he have stayed true to his revolutionary ethos? The question is unanswerable. What remains undeniable is that Tupac’s music is still the most anti-establishment catalogue in hip-hop history. He was a sociologist of the streets, a prophet of rage, a flawed son of the Panthers—and, above all, a reminder that art can be both a wound and a weapon.

His life ended in a hail of bullets, but his voice still unsettles, provokes, inspires. To listen to 2Pac today is to confront America’s unfinished wars—on race, class, gender, and justice itself. That is why, more than two decades later, he remains less a fallen star than an eternal rebel.