Though it’s been 26 years since 2Pac’s death, many of his words still ring true.
On Ari Melber’s MSNBC interview series Mavericks, Snoop Dogg reacted to powerful footage of the late rapper discussing the Black Panthers, how the organization helped Black Americans, and how ’Pac used that same model to support people through music. The host played a brief montage of clips where Shakur detailed the ways he and his community were tired of asking to be treated better.
“We was asking with the Panthers; we was asking with the Civil Rights Movement,” 2Pac said. “We was asking. Now those people that were asking, they’re all dead and in jail, so now what do you think we’re gonna do? Ask?”
“Fuck no,” Snoop immediately responded on the show. “Now you get it. Even watching that, my spirit is bubbling right now. Like I feel like fuckin’ somebody up from just hearing that, just because I know it puts me in that era, that zone when our voice didn’t matter back then. Things we were speaking to as far as corruption and violence and all that, they would take it and reverse it back on us as if, ‘No, you got a problem. You’re violent.’
“No. America’s violent,” the 50-year-old continued. “We was peaceful. The Black Panthers was put together to bear arms and do all this peaceful stuff. Y’all came and shot them down and knocked them down, and now we don’t have a voice. And now when we try to speak as rappers, you wanna lock us up and say our music is making people kill each other and this and that, and then we can’t bear arms.” The comment seems to be a nod to rappers being prosecuted over their lyrics, most recently Young Thug and Gunna.
The Doggfather went on, “All the stuff he was speaking to is happening right now, but this was 25 years ago. If we don’t stand up and make a difference and make a chance, it won’t change. That’s why we do what we do and we movin’ like we movin’ right now.”
Watch Snoop react to 2Pac’s words up top, and see the full Mavericks with Ari Melber episode below.
