Hi, I’m Kurt Loder, and this is „The Week In Rock.“
Although he’s now entering his second year in the past tense, the late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur continues to move product, and he’s still talking, too. Tupac’s final movie, a crime drama called „Gang Related,“ will be released on October 8th. To promote it, the studio, MGM, has sent out a press kit containing one of Shakur’s last filmed interviews, conducted in August of 1996, just a few weeks before he was murdered in Las Vegas. Tupac’s rap talent was sometimes disputed, but not his natural charisma as a screen actor, and here are his thoughts on that very subject.
TUPAC SHAKUR, 8.30.96: I can’t explain why I shine and no one else shines. I think everybody shines in different things. And a lot of things I can’t do. I can’t play basketball like every other black person in America. I can act, I know how to go to that true spot in myself, ‚cause I’m there everyday. I can be me, I can be whoever because I’m true to me, I can go to neutral easily. A lot of people, black, white, Mexican, young, old, fat or skinny, have a problem being true to their self, they have a problem looking into the mirror and looking directly into their own soul… [With] any character, I’m going to bring that intensity, that truth, that honesty to it, because I have to repay for that blessing.
MTV: As was the case with Tupac’s other posthumous film „Gridlock’d„, there will be a Death Row soundtrack attached to „Gang Related“ — score for which Shakur wrote several songs.
SHAKUR: I did a song for it already called „Fortune and Fame,“ and the hook goes like this: (singing) „Something we all adore, the one thing worth dying for, nothing for pain, stuck in this game, searching for fortune and fame… something we all adore, the one thing we dying for, nothing but pain, stuck in this game, searching for fortune and fame…“ That’s what I hear. It’s so basic that we all want to be famous and noticed and watched, and money and riches, and we all want the most out of life from the most heartless gang-banger to the most virtuous police officer.
The late Tupac Shakur on his last movie, „Gang Related,“ opening October 8th.
