20 years after his killing, Tupac still relevant
Twenty years after his unsolved murder, hip-hop star still relevant
Benny Boom and Tupac Shakur should have crossed paths back in the day.
Both were big on the New York music scene. They frequented the clubs and had common friends.
Boom, 45, a film director who earned some acclaim directing more than 200 music videos for artists such as LL Cool J, P. Diddy and Nicki Minaj, was also the same age as Shakur.
But fate wouldn’t bring them together until Boom was tapped to direct “All Eyez on Me,” a biopic about the late rapper who was fatally shot in Las Vegas in 1996. The movie premieres nationwide Friday — Shakur’s birthday.
“It’s interesting that we never met, but we should have,” said Boom, a Philadelphia native who lived in Houston and attended Westfield High School in Spring for a few years. His parents now live in Conroe. “He was sort of like a kindred spirit in a way. Because we never met, I was able to tell the story without an agenda. I wanted to give people a vision of Pac from the person who doesn’t know him. I wanted to explore him in away I would want to know him. That’s why it’s such a personal film.”
“All Eyez on Me,” which is taken from the title of Shakur’s fourth album, tells the story of the rapper’s life and the trappings of his success. Plagued with production delays and director changes, the movie took nearly a decade to make.
Boom was in Houston last month to promote the film during the All Eyez on Me Experience National
Tour that featured a state-of-the art, 91-seat traveling theater, in which fans watched a 13-minute preview of the movie and had conversations with the cast.
Boom calls the movie a “cautionary tale” with lessons for a new generation of Shakur fans who weren’t around when he was one of the primary stars of the ’90s hip-hop landscape.
“Pac was an amazing human being from the poetry, the way he was brought up and positivity he exuded. He was also complex and wanted to be a chameleon in every group, but he had to be the alpha male. That eventually led to his untimely death,” Boom said.
Shakur is played by big-screen newbie Demetrius Shipp, Jr. — who looks and acts so much like the rapper it’s stirring. The actor’s father, Demetrius Shipp, Sr., was a producer at Death Row Records, where Shakur was signed to a solo record deal, and produced “Toss It Up” on Shakur’s “The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory,” which was released two months after the rapper’s death in 1996.
“There are jewels that we drop and things in this film that we want the young kids in Chicago, Philly, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, to get, not just to celebrate Pac’s life but to take a look at themselves,” Boom said. “Maybe it’ll help them get their lives together so they don’t end up the way he did.”
A significant portion of the movie follows Shakur’s relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur, an activist and Black Panther who at one time was homeless and addicted to drugs. She stopped using drugs in 1991 after Shakur told her to get clean or to forget about being involved in his life. She died at age 69 in 2016.
“This is a motherson story. It’s Langston Hughes’ poem come to life for a mother and son,” Boom said.
Hughes’ famous “Mother to Son” poem reads:
Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor — Bare. But all the time I’se been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard. Don’t you fall now — For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Boom stressed Shakur’s life was much like the poem.
“This is the life he led from the beginning. Afeni was pregnant in prison with him. This story is an American story.”
The movie also chronicles Shakur’s friendship with highschool classmate and actress Jada Pinkett (played by Kat Graham), his contentious relationship with Death Row Records founder Suge Knight (Dominic L. Santana) and his romantic relationship with fiancée Kidada Jones (Annie Ilonzeh), daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones. There also are scenes involving R&B singer Faith Evans (Grace Gibson), who was married to rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
That Shakur’s music still resonates today also is part of the story, Boom said.
“Pac was honest. That’s a problem we have with hip and hop and rap now because there isn’t a lot of honesty. With rap, it was always about the voice of people, the voice of the street, the voice of the struggle that spoke to the socioeconomic situations that were happening in our communities. We’ve moved away from the honest portrayals. Tupac’s music is timeless.”
Now married and a father of four, Boom also hopes his own children will learn from Shakur’s legacy.
“My five-year-old drew a picture of Tupac,” he said. “She’s a child and doesn’t understand his influence yet, but I want all of my children to know that this was a guy who had the world in his hands. He had great talent, and it was taken from him. So if you have talent and a voice, pursue it and be honest about it.”