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October 27, 2025 18 mins
On this new episode, Vegas reviews the new 2Pac biography "Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur" by nest-selling author Jeff Pearlman.  Let's talk about it!

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on this week's episode of Hip Hop Now podcast,
It's a book review, Tupo, Let's get it. Welcome to
Hippop Now. Pip Fat Pass from the future. You know
what to do. Get your ass out of my bad life,

(00:21):
so disrespectful leg hip hop is say to today, Let's
get right in the business. What up, y'all? I am
your host Vegas and this hip Hop Now podcasting podcast
specifically designed to keep you caught up on all things
hip hop music and culture that happened throughout the week.
This is a bonus episode, so first and foremost salutations.

(00:47):
Shout outs to those who listen to this podcast in
audio form, and you can get it wherever you listen
to your audio podcasts just look up hip Hop Now podcast.
But also shout out to those of you watching right
here on YouTube. Big shout out to you trying to
get to twenty five thousand subscribers by the end of

(01:07):
twenty twenty five. Right now we are at twenty one
thousand subscribers. So if you love what you've seen or
heard from this channel, subscribe, hit the like button, comment,
I read the comments, I respond to comments, do all
those good things. But most importantly, shared with people you

(01:28):
know enjoy this kind of content. Let's get right into
the business. You saw the cover, you saw the title
of everything we're here to talk about. We don't do
this that often, and this was supposed to go down
another way, but it's going to go down this way. Okay.
It is a book review of the brand new book

(01:52):
just released by Jeff Pearlman. Only God can judge me
making the many lives of Tupac's shakoor right new book. Now,
I know you might say to yourself again, another pot book.
Come on, what are we doing? Well, we are being

(02:19):
fair and square. So let me tell you the gist
of how this book review came about and obviously give
you my review of the book. The author, Jeff Pearlman,
reached out to me via social media and was like,
I think you would dig this book, right. So we

(02:40):
went a little back and forth between you know, getting
the advance copy and all that good stuff, but he
looked out so I read it and here we are right.
So I do appreciate that when it comes to authors, right,
because I feel like, along with all the music that

(03:00):
we consume and articles and videos about hip hop this
game in general, we need to read, y'all. Reading is
not the same as watching a video about somebody talking
about a book, right. Reading is a very deep, intimate

(03:23):
experience like you experienced when you got the headphones on
and you zone and out listening to some Tupac you
know as a big fan. Now really quick, you know
there is some quote unquote controversy around this book, because

(03:45):
it was one of the questions I had first when
I did a little research when he reached out to me.
What makes a author, best selling author who was primarily
written about sports now want to write about hip hop
and Tupac in particular. That probably was my biggest question,

(04:10):
like where's the interest? Because there's a lot in this
book that is really good, and then there's some things
that you know, I can see upset and fans, And
I think the title of the book is fitting for
a number of reasons. We know only God can judge
me as the Tupac song kind of like Tupac's mantra.

(04:33):
But also when you're writing about someone, a biography about
someone who's not here to say that's true or that's
not true or whatever, or defend themselves if they had
to defend themselves, or even not necessarily authorized, but co

(04:57):
sign in some cases or whatever it may be. We
know that doesn't mean certain things are true versus certain
things not being true. We can really only deal with
what we have. And again, Tupac is not here. And
that's not to say that if Tupac refuted something in here,
it doesn't mean it didn't happen. But it helps to

(05:18):
have the person around to cosign that. But when you
don't have the person around to do a biography and
talk to them and question them, what you do is
you do a series of interviews. From what I understand,
Jeff Pearlman did an insane amount of interviews. And it
wasn't just you know, oh, let me ask the dude.

(05:40):
Let me ask the mailman if you liked Tupac. And
you know what story can he tell me? Now? It's family.
He got a ton of you know, we got a
ton from people who are very close who seldomly talk
about Tupac. So again, I'm not trying to prove an
any of the information correct or incorrect, or even the

(06:04):
motivations of the author. I'm just saying these are the questions, right,
and they have the questions I had going into the book,
especially about an author who's written mostly about sports. I'm
a big sports fan, so I have heard of him.

(06:25):
I haven't read any of his books, but that's not
because of interest. That's just because I don't read a
lot of books to begin with. I kind of read
the books that I'm most interested in. But that aside
two of the things that you've probably seen on social
media on the internet hip hop sites that reported it

(06:49):
because they read the book. There are two things that
are like standouts, and one of them, even though I
knew going into the book about it, the introduction to
this book is fantastic right now. You may have seen
and heard about them, basically finding Brenda's baby from the

(07:15):
song Brenda's Got a Baby, you know, And the short
form part of that story is Tupac read about this
real life story in the paper and wrote a song
about it. But Jeff Perlman and a couple of people
you know who he knows found the actual baby, who

(07:39):
is not a baby anymore obviously, and I think he's
done some interviews and stuff like that. But what was
compelling about it from an introduction standpoint was the fact
that I never thought to want to know much or
the intimate details about what happened. But knowing that that

(08:03):
song was one of the things that captured my attention
as a fan of hip hop back in the days
and Tupac, And when I read this introduction, which gives
you full details on what occurred in real life, and
then you look at how Tupac interpreted that story. And

(08:27):
her name isn't Brenda, by the way, but he's telling
the story about a real story. It just was so
dope to read something about a hip hop classic record
that I've admired for decades, You know what I'm saying.
I never really asked to like, oh, where bring the

(08:48):
baby at? I didn't know what happened. I didn't know
if the baby was alive or not. So that's one
of the things I like about the introduction to this book,
because it hooked me in as a hip hop fan,
as a fan of artists, even as a fan of journalism. Right,
some great journalism to do that also. But the other

(09:13):
thing in the book, and I'll give my overall review
of the book, but the other standout thing that you
may or may not have seen in the book that
some people are talking about. Some people hate the fact
that it's out there, or don't believe it, even though

(09:33):
you know, to his journalistic credit, you know, this isn't
a story being made up out of thin air. This
is coming from people very close to the situation. But
Tupac in high school, he went to a performance arts
high school in Baltimore, and if you know any performance
of arts high school, including the one in New York,

(09:58):
that they're real expressive and artsy, and from from people
who I've known who have told me, I don't know
first and I don't know, you know, they they're so
expressive that they start, you know, sometimes they are all
touching each other and maybe it's maybe it's not sexual touching.
Maybe it is in some cases and others is just

(10:20):
who they are. I think that's fine. That's what y'all do,
and that's cool, you know, because I'm not going to
say we ain't get great artists out of those environments
or whatever. But they said in the book that Tupac
was dressing weird in some cases, expressing expressing himself in

(10:43):
a way that some people wouldn't find to be very
masculine the way they know Tupac right, So of course
that sets some people off. But also kissing a boy
on a dare, right, and Uh, I guess the guy
who he kissed was also interviewed and UH basically was

(11:08):
saying like it wasn't like no passionate kiss. But then
he kind of goes on to say how he feelt
like they had a connection. But again when I said
about perception from UH, you know, multiple people different stories
in this. In this instance, like we don't get to
hear Tupac say, yo, we was we was wild right,

(11:31):
or yo, that didn't happen, or it was just a
dare and we were drunk, it was nothing more than that.
We don't have poc to say that. And this guy's
kind of given his interpretation of the situation. Now hip
hop is homophobic. I did a whole podcast on it.
It just is right. So whether this is true, whether

(11:55):
that guy's instincts when it came to him and Pok
in high school were there, whether people who knew him
wanted to categorize him as heterosexual will also bisexual. We
don't know anybody who knows. They know right, without a

(12:16):
doubt they would know. So my opinion on it, who cares? Honestly?
Who cares? I don't I think again, Pok's not here
to refute anything. And at the same time, there's parts
of me that believes some of it because of the

(12:37):
fact I know people who've gone to you know, art
design type high schools and say that some not all,
some people are just like that because it's just, you know,
they all expressive and everything is an extension of their expression.
So do with that what you will. But I will

(12:58):
say this about book. I liked the book. I feel
like what I got from it was a deeper connection
to Tupac. Now. I know you may say, well, how
much connection you need. Tupac wasn't absolutely shy about his
life and his feelings and his motivations, and that is true.

(13:22):
I feel like I know Tupac strictly through his music,
but also through various interviews he's done across the years,
even an exhibit that I visited in LA about two
years ago about Tupac which did which taught me a
lot more about him on a deeper level, just based

(13:45):
off of what was there, from his Rohm books to
the write ups about his mother and the Black Panthers
and being pregnant with Pac all the way through to
his untimely death. Right. So, I feel like I know Tupac,
but I think the amount of interviews in journalism as

(14:07):
far as like what Jeff Pearlman was able to get
from these interviews and present, I feel like you learn
a little bit more about pop. Now, I will say this,
if you've read a million Tupac books, you probably have
a different perception of what's here. That's because, honestly, that's

(14:31):
what is going to come down to. I have not
This is the only Tupac biography I've ever read, and
I don't read many, and that's that's why I write,
because I always I'm one of those people. I'm like,
I listen to the music watch interviews. Now that I
went to an exhibit, I know Pac, but there's always

(14:52):
a layer that's much deeper that you don't know. And lastly,
I'll say this just about the start of the book, right,
So the introduction did a lot to get me into
the book, but it was about Tupac, but it wasn't right.
But it had me interesting just because of the connection

(15:13):
with that record. But having the first couple of chapters
dig deeply into the life of a Phoenie Shakur, Tupac's mother,
I thought was excellent, mainly because what I've known about
a Phoenix Shakur is always mother was a black panther,
as father was a black panther, and you know, at

(15:36):
some point she was on drugs, and like I know,
again through the music, through the stories of Tupac, I
felt like I knew a Phoenix Chakor. But this brought
me down to a ground level of knowing her in
a way that's relatable. And I'm not saying that to
say like, oh, yeah, you know, my mother did the

(15:58):
same thing she did not, But there are stories like
that in the neighborhood that we can relate to, whether
it's a relative or whether it's somebody else's parent or
mother or whatever. And you see the struggle and seeing
a Phoenix Chakor struggle early on, but also fight and

(16:23):
sort of have a reputation for fighting for the rights,
fighting for civil rights of black people, even defending herself
in court. You see where Tupac gets his spirit from.
We've heard about it, but I think the detail here,
at least for me, was a nice setup getting into

(16:46):
who Tupac was. It was a perfect setup. So what
I'll say to you is, if you feel like you
know everything about Tupac. You've read all the books, watch
all the vido documentaries, got all the albums, listen to whatever.
This book might not even move you, right if you

(17:06):
have a basic knowledge of Tupac. I feel like it's
a decent starter for somebody who maybe you didn't get
into the music, but maybe this will help you. And
for anybody who's never been interested in Tupac. Why are
you watching this video anyway? You know what I'm saying.
So there you have it. That's my review on Jeff

(17:30):
Pearlman's Only God can judge me the Many Lives of
Tupac's Kor Do you have the book? Do you plan
to read the book? Yes? Or no? Leave your comments
in a comments section below and let me know why.
I'm not about arguing with anybody, but I am interested
in knowing those who are interested in the book versus
those who will not read it, because that's been going around.

(17:54):
Also tell me why subscribe to the channel twenty five
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(18:14):
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go right back into the show until next time, y'all.
I'm not a critic, I'm a fan base.
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