On Dean Van Nguyen’s Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur
The name “Tupac” floats now above history. His image is as globally iconic as that of Che Guevara: reproduced on T-shirts, murals, tattoos, posters, at once revolutionary, commodified, and spectral. In the afterlife of American empire, there is a peculiar way in which its most dangerous dissidents are first destroyed and then sanctified. Martin Luther King Jr. is stripped of socialism and militancy. Malcolm X is cleansed of his critique of the liberal North. Tupac Shakur, rapper, revolutionary, son of the Panther underground, is reimagined as a kind of tragic rock star, a hip hop James Dean. In Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, Dean Van Nguyen attempts a recovery. Not merely of the man, but of the historical conjuncture that produced him. Not a biography in the usual sense, nor a hagiography of the “realest to ever do it,” but a political reconstruction: Tupac as product of counterinsurgency, as theorist of Black pain, as revolutionary aborted by capital.
From its opening pages, Nguyen’s work positions Tupac not as an anomaly or exception, but as the inheritor of a brutal tradition. Born in 1971 to Afeni Shakur, herself pregnant during the Panther 21 trial. Tupac entered the world not in the cradle of post-civil rights liberal optimism, but in the ruins of crushed rebellion. “His mother,” Nguyen reminds us, “fought the United States government before he could walk. His godfather [Geronimo Pratt] spent 27 years in prison on a frame-up charge” (p. 14). His step-aunt, Assata Shakur, remains exiled in Cuba. His family, in short, was the Black liberation struggle in miniature and the American state treated them accordingly.
“To understand Tupac is to understand the America that made him—and unmade him” (p. 4).
The spectre that looms largest over the first half of the book is not Tupac, but COINTELPRO. The FBI’s counterintelligence programme, designed to “neutralise” Black radical leadership, forms a quiet backdrop to Nguyen’s account of the 1970s and 80s, and rightly so. By the time Tupac was a teenager in Baltimore, the movement had been smashed, its leaders killed or exiled, and what remained of its memory either pathologised or commodified. What Van Nguyen achieves is a careful mapping of this historical violence onto Tupac’s development, not just as an artist, but as a thinker. “Tupac’s childhood was littered with the ruins of Black radicalism,” he writes. “It’s little wonder he tried to build something from the rubble” (p. 22).There’s a quiet brilliance to the way Nguyen reclaims Tupac’s music and persona as political interventions. This is not the familiar trope of the “conscious rapper” à la Talib Kweli or Common, those polite liberal alternatives offered up by white tastemakers. Tupac was never that clean. But Nguyen insists we treat his lyrics as theory nonetheless—embodied theory, emotional theory, insurgent theory. Songs like “Trapped,” “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” and “White Man’z World” are read not as isolated acts of empathy or introspection, but as sustained critiques of the carceral state, patriarchy, and racialised poverty. In one of the book’s most resonant lines, Nguyen observes: “Tupac rapped about police brutality before it was trendy because police had always brutalised him” (p. 48).
“The political Tupac was always at war with the performative one” (p. 72).
This war. Between Tupac the revolutionary and Tupac the commodity. Forms the heart of Nguyen’s project. There is no tidy resolution offered. The book’s narrative arc moves through his Julliard-trained youth, his embrace of West Coast gangster aesthetics, the contradictions of his alliance with Suge Knight and Death Row, and his ultimately doomed attempt to build what he called a “code of Thug Life” part ethos, part survival strategy, part blueprint for the lumpenproletariat. “Tupac,” Nguyen writes, “understood the conditions of the ghetto not as a result of individual failure, but as a deliberate consequence of state abandonment” (p. 93). His idea of “thug life” was less about nihilism and more a defiant re-signification, a refusal to be ashamed of one’s scars.
Where Van Nguyen is especially sharp is in highlighting how Tupac’s militancy was constantly absorbed and neutralised by the cultural industry. “His revolutionary desire was channelled into entertainment—marketable, reproducible, profitable” (p. 103). Here, the shadow of Mark Fisher is palpable. Just as Fisher diagnosed capitalist realism as a kind of ontological claustrophobia, Nguyen shows how Tupac’s artistic output was shaped, constrained, by the representational limits of the 1990s. Gangsta rap was permitted, even rewarded, so long as it confirmed the spectacle of the Black male as threat. Political rap, unless cloaked in metaphor or self-destruction, was not.
There are passages where Nguyen gestures towards a more thorough structural analysis, particularly around mass incarceration, labour exploitation, and empire, but doesn’t quite follow them to their conclusion. This is not a failure of intellect, but perhaps of form: the book is relatively short, and its ambition is considerable. Still, the reader is left wanting a fuller engagement with thinkers like Cedric Robinson or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an expansion of the field that would place Tupac within a longer Marxist genealogy of racial capitalism.
“Tupac’s tragedy was not that he was too political, but that he was political in a time when the left had been smashed” (p. 147).
Van Nguyen does, however, succeed in one of the book’s most important goals: to reclaim Tupac as a comrade. This is no small thing in an era where the radical Black tradition is often emptied of its Marxism, its internationalism, or its class critique. When Tupac speaks of police as an occupying force, of America as a prison, of capitalism as a machine that eats the poor, he is not being metaphorical. Nguyen shows how Tupac’s political education, shaped by his mother’s Panther past, his own reading in prison (Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Malcolm X), and his encounters with violence, was both coherent and evolving.
The contradictions in Tupac’s politics. Particularly around gender, are not ignored. His conviction for sexual abuse is addressed with clarity and care. Nguyen refuses exoneration or reduction. Instead, he frames the contradiction as symptomatic of a larger crisis: the way in which revolutionary potential is stunted, misdirected, or mangled by patriarchy and capitalism alike. In this sense, Nguyen shares terrain with bell hooks, who once argued that Black male resistance to white supremacy must also involve a reckoning with misogyny. “Tupac could imagine freedom,” Nguyen writes, “but not yet equality” (p. 109).
The afterlife of Tupac. Perhaps the most mythologised in hip hop, is treated by Nguyen with appropriate wariness. In the book’s closing chapters, he tracks the ways in which Tupac has been transformed into a “safe” rebel, his rage sanitised, his revolutionary instincts blurred by posthumous commodification. Nguyen quotes from a 2002 mural in Oakland: “Tupac lives forever.” The question, he suggests, is how, and for whom? What would it mean to keep alive not the image but the politics? Not the brand, but the critique?
“Tupac died trying to build something. The tragedy is not that he failed, but that we live in a world where he had to” (p. 153).
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