The Rap icon watched clips of Pac’s politically-driven interviews and was fired up.
Their friendship was one that was immortalized in the studio and in the various interviews that can still be recovered. In the decades that have followed Tupac Shakur’s unexpected death, Snoop Dogg has memorialized his collaborator whenever possible, often speaking about Pac’s revolutionary mindset. The slain rapper was an activist as well as a hitmaker, and many of his impassioned moments with the media have continued to motivate people looking for political change.
During his feature on MSNBC with Ari Melber, Snoop was shown a clip of several political remarks made by Tupac. “Now you get it. Even watching that, my spirit is bubbling right now,” he said.
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“I feel like f*ckin’ somebody up from just hearing that, just because I know it puts me in that era, in that zone when we—our voice didn’t matter back then,” Snoop said. “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. You’re this.’ No! America’s violent!”
“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.”
“Like, All the stuff he was speaking to is happening right now, but this was 25 years ago. So it’s like, if we don’t stand up and make a difference and make a change, it won’t change. So, that’s why we do what we do and we movin’ like we movin’ right now.”
When asked where he believes Tupac would be if he were still alive, Snoop said, “Right where I’m at, or further.”