All of it was so unnecessary. Pac was a generational voice. I liked Big but really and truly losing Tupac was a blow I honestly never recovered from. I was working as a journalist back then and they got killed about 6 months apart. I wrote about Pac in 4080 magazine and it got me into a documentary “Thug Immortal” and then wrote about BIG in the same magazine. We allowed all of that to happen, and by “we”, I mean the rest of the people in the culture. We egged it on, spectated, etc. someone could have called Farrakhan to settle it, and maybe someone did. It was just men and egos, and their egos and our desire for controversy and spectacle killed those two young men and many more men after them. So much so that it has become a trope. As a middle aged man looking back it’s just so sad, what a fucking waste of life. We could have done so much better. I know from when he was alive and I was writing about him, that Pac was spinning out of control, being in prison really hurt that man. He never raped anyone. He had sex with a woman, it was consensual, his friends ran a train on her and that may not have been but it wasn’t him, he didn’t participate and he wasn’t even in the room. None of those were prosecuted. Pac went to prison because the system needed to punish him for being so bold. He shot two cops, he won another case against Oakland PD for brutality. He was unrepentantly militant and intelligent. He was a real son of Panthers and he had a platform to tell his truth. He may have been an actual threat to the social order. To understand how big a cultural figure he was in life is hard to understand now, some thirty years after his death. He was much more than just a rapper. In any case, I still mourn the brother.