03-08-2025
Why Tupac's music and politics still resonate with the Irish
We present an extract from Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, the new book by Dean Van Nguyen.
From Pitchfork and Guardian contributor Dean Van Nguyen comes a revelatory history of Tupac beyond his musical legend, as a radical son of the Black Panther Party whose political legacy still resonates today.
Growing up in Dublin, Ireland, I saw Tupac as omnipresent in the schoolyard. In the late 1990s, kids with distinct musical taste tended to fit into two camps: there were the rockers, who wore thick black hoodies, often bearing the face of their deity, Kurt Cobain. And there were those who gravitated toward gangster rap, then reaching the peak of its global infl uence. To the latter, 2Pac CDs were a currency of cool; "Thug Life" was a slogan scrawled on many notebooks and bookbags. When some Irish kids were old enough, they got Tupac tattoos inked on their skin.
Listen: Dean Van Nguyen talks Tupac to RTÉ Arena
It should come as no surprise that Tupac appeals to the children of Ireland, a nation that after four hundred years of British colonial rule embraced the ideals of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Unlike Public Enemy, whose songs had more specificity, or N.W.A., whose portraits of dissent felt undetachable from the South Central Los Angeles streets that inspired them, Irish people could transplant meaning onto Tupac. He was an icon of righteous defiance, cut from the same cloth, we surmised, as Irish freedom fighters. I believe he grew more popular in Ireland after he died because that's what Irish heroes did: James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Roger Casement, Michael Collins— they all died for their cause. "I will live by the gun and die by the gun" is a quote often attributed to Tupac. To Irish revolutionaries, it could have been a rallying cry.
The first 2Pac song I remember being enthralled with was "Do for Love," a posthumous single that sees him chart a rocky romantic relationship. I was twelve years old, browsing for CD singles in chain record store HMV, when the creeping, funky bass line grabbed me. Then there was 2Pac's voice, so often parodied but always so powerful. I stayed in the store until the end of the song and bought it immediately. Included on the disc was "Brenda's Got a Baby," 2Pac's famous single- verse saga of a preteen girl molested by her cousin, impregnated, forced to turn to sex work, and slain on the streets. It was a heavy song for me, not yet a teenager. But a dose of realism from beyond my gray, narrow, all- boys Catholic school upbringing was no bad thing, and nobody could paint these portraits as vividly as 2Pac. Perhaps this is why his albums were passed around the schoolyard like precious contraband.
It should come as no surprise that Tupac appeals to the children of Ireland, a nation that after four hundred years of British colonial rule embraced the ideals of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Unlike Public Enemy, whose songs had more specificity, or N.W.A., whose portraits of dissent felt undetachable from the South Central Los Angeles streets that inspired them, Irish people could transplant meaning onto Tupac. He was an icon of righteous defiance, cut from the same cloth, we surmised, as Irish freedom fighters. I believe he grew more popular in Ireland after he died because that's what Irish heroes did: James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Roger Casement, Michael Collins— they all died for their cause. "I will live by the gun and die by the gun" is a quote often attributed to Tupac. To Irish revolutionaries, it could have been a rallying cry.
In 2008, popular comedy rap duo the Rubberbandits recorded a song called "Up Da Ra," which playfully examined the lasting popularity of this slogan of support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The song includes the line "And to all the patriots who have died before in the Irish wars? / I know you're up in heaven smoking a joint with Tupac and Bob Marley." I spoke to Blindboy Boatclub, the group's core creative turned author and podcaster, about the lyrics. It was, he said, partially infl uenced by seeing drawings on bus stops of Tupac with a speech bubble saying "Tiocfaidh ár lá," an Irish- language slogan of defiance that translates to "Our day will come." He also remembered a mural in Ballynanty, Limerick, that portrayed Tupac alongside a group of rugby players with horses in the background. It was, Blindboy asserted, "beautiful."
"The lads would have been booting around in Honda Civics in '97, '98, they were playing the Wolfe Tones, Bob Marley, and 2Pac," Blindboy said. "The Wolfe Tones and 2Pac, you played them alongside each other and whatever it was, it represented the same thing. I don't know if people were thinking about it but there was a similarity. I always compare certain Irish rebel songs to gangster rap."
Ireland's affinity for Tupac is just the latest in a mutual sense of kinship shared by Irish people and Black American activists that can be traced across centuries. In 1845, Frederick Douglass fled to Ireland to escape slave catchers after the publication of his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. He encountered Daniel O'Connell, an Irishman fighting for Catholic emancipation in Ireland. At the time, Catholics were a majority in Ireland, but subject to harsh rule by the Protestant minority and the British Empire. O'Connell was opposed to all forms of oppression and was one of the few political leaders who spoke out against American slavery. Douglass drew comfort and inspiration from O'Connell: "I have heard many speakers within the last four years— speakers of the first order; but I confess, I have never heard one, by whom I was more completely captivated than by Mr. O'Connell."
After the Irish War of Independence, a guerrilla struggle fought from 1919 to 1921 by revolutionary paramilitary organization the IRA against British rule, there was the establishment of the Irish Republic, which resulted in partition of the island. Six of Ireland's thirty- two counties located in the north of Ireland remained under British rule. Irish Catholics in the north suddenly found themselves on the opposite side of a border from their countrymen and kin. Living among a Protestant majority who saw themselves as British, the Catholics were denied basic rights such as votes, housing, and jobs. By the 1960s, they were taking their cues from the civil rights movement in the United States by organizing protests, but these were ruthlessly suppressed. A need for protection revived Irish paramilitary operations, with some identifying as the successors of the old IRA. "Everyone was very radicalized at that stage," said Tim Brannigan, a west Belfast Black Irish Catholic who went to prison in the 1990s on IRA weapons charges. "But, of course, what the IRA did was rather than see the potential for a mass movement, they saw the potential for clandestine guerrilla struggle." The kinship between the Black American struggle and the Catholic struggle was sharply felt in Derry, a city in Northern Ireland. In August 1969, a march was organized to protest discrimination, but participants faced counterdemonstrations and a police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), its officers deploying water cannons and batons. Residents of the Bogside neighborhood responded by rioting. In what became known as the Battle of the Bogside, Catholic resisters declared the area autonomous territory.
They erected barricades to prevent the police entering. Radio Free Derry played rebel songs as a call to locals to resist. A famous mural reading "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" was painted on a corner house signifying a police-free zone. It's still there today, an enduring symbol of the resistance. Lasting intermittently for three years, Free Derry showed the power of a community united against oppressive forces. Yet Derry would be deeply wounded by some of the most brutal sectarian violence in what would become known as the Troubles. In 1972, there was Bloody Sunday, a peaceful protest that was attacked by the British Army and resulted in the murder of fourteen civilians, a case which is still unresolved.
Imprisoned for a short period for her role in the Battle of the Bogside was Bernadette Devlin. A working- class revolutionary socialist, Devlin was elected as an MP to the British Parliament aged only twenty- one. In 1969, she toured the United States to raise funds for political prisoners in Ireland. Such was her celebrity that she even made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. As the tour stretched on, Devlin spoke increasingly about the Black American struggle, criticizing Irish Americans for failing to show unity despite the obvious parallels occurring back in their motherland. They may have been opening their wallets for her cause, but to Devlin, these Irish Americans were complicit in a similarly oppressive policing system that brought tyranny to marginalized communities. After being awarded the freedom key to New York by the city's mayor, John Lindsay, she delivered it to the local Black Panthers via her comrade, Eamonn McCann, with a message: "To all these people, to whom this city and this country belong, I return what is rightfully, theirs, this symbol of the freedom of New York."
Devlin befriended Angela Davis after visiting the imprisoned Panther in 1971. Years later, Davis joined the campaign to free Devlin's daughter, Róisín McAliskey, jailed on IRA bombing charges. Addressing a protest in San Francisco, Davis declared, "Róisín must be freed and Northern Ireland released from the shackles of British imperialism!" (In his book How the Irish Became White, author Noel Ignatiev explains how the new Irish immigrants in America achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of Black Americans. This was the start of a chasm between Irish people and Irish Americans that exists today. While in general, Irish Americans look fondly at the island many see as their ancestral home, the descendants of the Irish who stayed look at them with less affection.)
Ireland's affinity for Tupac is just the latest in a mutual sense of kinship shared by Irish people and Black American activists that can be traced across centuries.
The IRA and the Black Panther Party were founded to fight back against oppressive states. Both established networks of community services to provide what the state failed to offer. Both faced suppression through counterintelligence. And both sought a radical left- wing reorganization of society. The two groups, not failing to spot the parallels, used their own newspapers to report on and support each other's cause.
It was instinctual for Irish freedom fighters to express solidarity with other political prisoners given their long history of imprisonment at the hands of the British state. Throughout the twentieth century, Irish prisoners used hunger strikes to protest British authority, many condemning themselves to the horrible fate of death by starvation. Playwright and politician Terence MacSwiney died after a seventy-four-day hunger strike in 1920; his demise was known to have had a profound impact on Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Black nationalist leader. Garvey even sent telegrams to both British prime minister David Lloyd George, urging him to compromise so Mac-Swiney's life could be spared, and to Mac Swiney's priest, asking him to "convey to McSwiney [sic] sympathy of 400,000,000 Negroes." Garvey's admiration for the Irish response to colonial rule had been total. The year before MacSwiney's death, he declared, "The time has come for the Negro race to offer up its martyrs upon the altar of liberty even as the Irish has given a long list, from Robert Emmet to Roger Casement."
As the Troubles in Ireland continued throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, and the Provisional IRA's bombing campaign, undertaken with the goal of ending British rule in the six counties, claimed more and more innocent lives, they struggled for support at home and abroad, dubbed terrorists rather than freedom fighters.
Still, after peace on the island was achieved through the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a younger generation, with no war to fight, but who still shout "Up the Ra," have found alternative ways to keep the spirit of resistance as part of their identity. Expressing kinship with Tupac is the contemporary version of the same mutual understanding between Irish and Black American struggle. Around the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a key event in the Irish struggle for independence, a Facebook page was set up with the purpose of ensuring Tupac received credit for his contributions to the cause. The group's admins photoshopped Tupac into old photos, alongside Connolly, Pearse, and other heroes of the armed rebellion who'd almost all been executed for the part they played. It was for laughs, yes, but through meme culture, the group was ambiently solidifying the bond. It made a weird kind of sense:
Tupac Shakur was in the original IRA. The joke wouldn't have worked with any other rapper— maybe, even, no other American.
