Book review: Intriguing read probes many faces of controversial rapper

By the end of this excellent biography, you may not like Tupac Shakur, but you certainly know him

Tupac Shakur: A remarkable characters whose fame transcended his music and movies. Picture: AP/Frank Wiese

• Only God Can Judge Me
• Jeff Pearlman
• Harper Collins, €36.25

In the lexicon of book reviewers, forensic is always a popular choice of adjective. What better word to describe the lengths the author of a non-fiction book has gone to in research? Forensic doesn’t quite describe the digging Jeff Pearlman carried out in the piecing together of Only God Can Judge Me, his exhaustive biography of Tupac Shakur, a noble attempt to offer a more rounded portrait of one of the most controversial figures in American popular culture in the late 20th century.

One of those remarkable characters whose fame transcended his music and movies, Shakur’s brief life left such an impact that today, nigh on three decades after his murder, teenagers buy T-shirts at Target with his face on them.

In trying to explain this enduring posthumous celebrity, Pearlman leaves no stone left unturned. No friend or acquaintance (and given the peripatetic nature of Shakur’s childhood, there are many) is left unquestioned. 

Having conducted 652 interviews, his diligence is evident in so many revealing anecdotes and eyewitness testimony, each one pulling back the curtain a little more and lending itself to what is the most comprehensive account of the rapper cum actor’s troubled life.

Only God Can Judge Me, By Jeff Pearlman

It is a book of two halves. The first delineates his extraordinarily tough upbringing. His mother Afeni was pregnant with him when she defended herself on trial as part of “the Black Panther 21” in 1970. Despite never having graduated high school, never mind law school, she was acquitted. 

An extraordinary feat, she proved to be a far better court performer than she was a parent, and Shakur’s childhood is a grim affair. Sifting through the Dickensian detail of every slum he lived in, from Baltimore, Maryland, to Marin County, California, you wonder how the poor child could have amounted to anything.

All that sympathy erodes in the second half when Pearlman depicts Shakur’s simultaneous professional blossoming and personal deterioration. With every page, you become more and more appalled at what a complex yet terrible character he turns out to be. A Potemkin gangster, he preaches about the greatness of thug life and assaults women. 

For all the skills he evinces with a microphone in hand or in front of the movie camera, he’s a truly reprehensible individual.

“How is one both a misogynistic rapist and a sensitive future spouse?” asks Pearlman. “How is one both comfortable calling women bitches and writing the lyrics to ‘Keep Ya Head Up’? How is one a bibliophile and naive? How does one read multiple newspapers per day and oftentimes seem ignorant? How can one be a by-product of the Black Panthers and appear to stand for nothing the organisation believed in? Even as a man engaged to a woman he referred to as ‘my everything’, Tupac continued to play the field and seek out sex.” 

More noted in the United States for producing some of the best and best-selling sports books of the past decade or so, Pearlman has veered far outside his usual lane here, to tremendous effect. Raw and compelling stuff, he writes with the passion of somebody who is obviously a fan of the music. Crucially, though, the reporter in him never shies away from chronicling his subject’s wide-ranging crimes and misdemeanours.

By the time you read the scenes about his shooting death in LA in 1996, you may or may not like Shakur, but this work ensures you definitely know him. The very definition of an excellent biography.