2017 Challenge - The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Poetry Bonus 1

The Rose That Grew From Concrete, by Tupac Shakur

Reason for Reading: This challenge is about broadening my perspective, and the world of hip hop is a mystery to me. Now, this is a collection of poetry and not a novel, so I didn't read it through.

I don't know much about Tupac's life or music. Honestly, I could stand to do a similar challenge for music, because I barely know any music outside of that which utterly pervades western culture. I know only that he was a rapper who came up from nothing and wrote about hardship and violence, and who was killed in a probably gang-related shooting, while still fighting a sexual assault conviction on appeal(1). The latter is especially  noteworthy given his preoccupations in verse with love, rather than lust, friendship and respect. A good proportion of the poems in the collection are dedicated to a specific individual, as a token of friendship or deeper affection. Those later in the book have a darker tone, as those are mostly the ones that talk about his own death, many written months or weeks before he was shot. Even these, however, are introspective and concern his fears or his hopes more than dwelling on the possibility of violence.

There is a simplicity to Tupac's verse. This is not a man steeped in years of exposure to the classics and certainly not someone who obsesses over every single word, which by some lights probably makes him a poor poet, but there's a clarity and a power in that simplicity, rather than naivety. The book is composed with facing pages carrying a printed version of a poem and the original, written in an exercise book in a mix of capitals and lower case print, with crossings out and corrections still in place and never a word if a number would do.

Normally I would hate that, but that's because normally retaining such shorthand would be a sign of sloppy editing, but there is no editing here. These aren't verses carefully curated for publication, but thoughts and feelings preserved in the moment. It's an extraordinary glimpse into a man who was patently more complex than just another dead gangsta; far too complex for me to offer any substantial analysis based on a few readings.

(1) I don't have an opinion on whether he did it or not. He was convicted, but I find it as easy to believe that a black rapper could be wrongly convicted of such a crime as I do that a white businessman could get away with it.