9.13.2010

September 13, 1996....


I always greet the death of Tupac Shakur with a complete bittersweet sadness....
It was a great time in music...I was a sophomore in high school...Morgan Park was my haven...It was great...
Friday night...I just got home from doing God knows what when I got the call...Tupac died...I remember running outside crying in my front yard...at this point I had a lifesize poster of Tupac on my wall...several all over the wall and one covering the door...someone that knew someone else knew of my love for Tupac and made sure they got me a couple "pics" for my wall...I was convinced that Pac was going to usher us back into the civil rights movement and I would be one of the freedom fighters...

My cousin Richarde(pronounced Rashad) was a brilliant thug in training...he only joined his gang cause he was tired of fighting them every time he went to school...I forget what happened exactly...he was the one that introduced me to Tupac...he would sit me down and say Lat-rice...this is the music that you need to listen to...this is something that will change your life...the summer he spent on house arrest at my house was one the greatest ever...he would sit in the basement spinning mama's wax...putting me own to even more hip hop then I thought I could ever imagine...he made sure that I knew about more than the BDP's and Native Tongues that I was into...he wanted me to know about harder hip hop as well...it was supremely awesome...he was a brilliant young man, in the right circumstances probably would have resulted in him taking over the world...but this was the life that he was handed....

Richarde always said that his life paralleled Tupac....and I would always say...Richard E...you and Tupac are not parallel in anyway...you wish you were Tupac...

September 7, 1996 Tupac was shot in Vegas....he died September 13, 1996...

September 26, 1997 my cousin Richarde was shot with an exploding halogen bullet...he died October 11, 1997.

Neither of them were supposed to die from the wounds they suffered...they were supposed to survive and continue working to change the world...

I remember September 13, cause I remember my cousin saying that something was going to happen to him...that his live was truly aligned with Tupac...this was before I really recognize my gift of discernment so I remember only being concerned and feeling eerie every time my cousin called with something new happening in his life... September 13, 1996 was a precursor to September 26, 1997...and they were both life changing days for me....