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Shafaq News
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Shafaq News
Iran condemns US plan to rename Persian Gulf: A hostile step
Shafaq News/ Iranian officials have strongly criticized reports that US President Donald Trump plans to officially adopt the term "Arabian Gulf" during his upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia, calling the move politically motivated and provocative. According to The Associated Press, two unnamed US officials said Trump is expected to announce next week that Washington will begin referring to the body of water as either the "Arabian Gulf" or the "Gulf of Arabia", replacing the widely recognized historical name "Persian Gulf." Reacting to the report, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected what he described as an attempt to alter a name long established in historical and international usage. 'The name Persian Gulf, like many geographical terms, is deeply rooted in human history,' Araghchi wrote on X, 'Iran has never objected to names such as the Sea of Oman, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, or Red Sea. These do not imply ownership, but reflect shared geographic heritage.' He added that any effort to change the name for political purposes would be perceived as a hostile gesture toward Iran and its people. The foreign minister also shared an image from the US Library of Congress depicting the waterway labeled as the Persian Gulf, stressing that the name remains internationally recognized and consistently used in historical cartography and by global institutions. Reza Nasri, a senior Iranian foreign policy expert, warned that a shift in terminology could spark widespread protests from Iranian communities abroad, particularly in the United States and at American diplomatic missions worldwide. 'Few issues bring together Iranians across political divides like any attempt to rename the Persian Gulf,' Nasri said. The naming dispute has resurfaced periodically over the past few decades. The term Persian Gulf has been documented in historical records since at least the 16th century and remains the standard designation in United Nations documents and international treaties. However, in recent years, some Arab Gulf states have increasingly used the term "Arabian Gulf" in their domestic communications. The US military has also used that terminology in official statements, a practice that has previously drawn criticism from Tehran. This would not be the first time President Trump has drawn controversy over the issue. In 2017, during his first term, similar language prompted then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to publicly suggest that Trump needed to 'study geography.' The name Persian Gulf, like many geographical designations, is deeply rooted in human history. Iran has never objected to the use of names such as the Sea of Oman, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, or Red Sea. The use of these names does not imply ownership by any particular nation, but… — Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) May 7, 2025
Euronews
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Patti Smith announces a new memoir 'Bread of Angels'
ADVERTISEMENT The legendary Patti Smith has shared details of her new memoir, 'Bread of Angels', which will be published on 4 November. Smith, 78, made the announcement on Instagram alongside an image of the poet-writer-musician with her parents as a young adult, writing: 'This is with my mother and father who inspired much of my next book Bread of Angels. The memoir, a bright and dark dance of life, will be published on November 4th, by Random House.' 'Bread of Angels' is Smith's third memoir after the wonderful 'Just Kids' in 2010 and the mesmerizing 'M Train' in 2015. In 'Just Kids,' winner of the 2010 National Book Award, Smith looked back on her early years in New York City and her romance and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Meanwhile, 'M Train' was a chronicle of Smith's later years following the huge success of her album 'Horses' in 1975 and the 40 years that came after which were tragically punctuated by the losses of her husband Fred 'Sonic' Smith, her brother Todd Smith, and Mapplethorpe - who all died within the space of a few weeks in 1994. Voir cette publication sur Instagram Une publication partagée par This is Patti Smith (@thisispattismith) The synopsis for 'Bread of Angels' reads: 'The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.' It continues: 'As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again - the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.' The book's release date is deeply personal, coinciding with Mapplethorpe's birthday and the anniversary of Fred Smith's death. Later this year, Smith will spend time on the road celebrating the 50th anniversary of her seminal debut album, 'Horses' - which features hits like 'Gloria' and 'Redondo Beach'. 'Horses' has appeared in numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time and was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry in 2009. Smith collapsed on stage in Brazil in January and later wrote on Instagram that she suffered 'some post migraine dizziness.' The incident has not stopped her from planning her upcoming tour in Europe, which starts on 1 July in Germany and will take her to Italy, Ireland, UK, Belgium, Norway and France, where she'll round off the EU leg of her tour on 21 October at L'Olympia in Paris.
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Patti Smith's Horses at 50: How a reluctant musician made a punk-rock classic
Patti Smith never planned to front a rock band. In 1971, when the music producer and manager Sandy Pearlman approached her about making music, she laughed and told him she had a perfectly good job in a bookstore. Pearlman had seen her performing her poems at St Mark's Church in New York's Bowery against a backdrop of feedback courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. (Also in the audience that night: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Todd Rundgren, Sam Shepard and Smith's ex-boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.) In Smith, Pearlman saw a rock star in the making, but it took four more years for Smith to warm to the idea. Finally, in 1975, her first LP, Horses, was born. This November, Horses will be 50, an anniversary that is being honoured first with a tribute concert this month at New York's Carnegie Hall featuring Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, Karen O and more, and in the autumn by Smith herself in a string of concerts where she will perform the album in its entirety. Horses – which is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress for being a record that's considered 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant' – was not only one of the most explosive debuts of the 1970s: it lit the touchpaper for the New York punk rock scene. It arrived five months before the Ramones' self-titled debut, and two years ahead of Richard Hell's Blank Generation, Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and Television's Marquee Moon. In her 2019 book Revenge of the She-Punks, the music journalist Vivien Goldman describes Smith as 'a new breed of autonomous, self-defined and uninhibited female rock star'. At the time, Smith didn't give much thought to being a woman in a male-dominated scene – at least, not until men started shouting 'Get back to the kitchen' at her during gigs. In the sleeve notes to Horses, she wrote of being 'beyond gender', later explaining that as an artist 'I can take any position, any voice, that I want'. Nowadays she is often called the godmother of punk, or punk's poet laureate, yet it is men who still dominate accounts of the scene. But it would be wrong to attribute that entirely to misogyny. Smith may have provided a template for a new generation of musicians, but musically she existed in a category of her own; you might call it 'punk adjacent'. Horses had a furious passion, and cared little for musical proficiency, but it didn't sound like the work of a snotty upstart reflexively railing against authority. Instead, it bridged the gap between punk rock and poetry, with vocals that shifted between singing and spoken word. Smith was loud in her appreciation of writers and poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blake, Genet, Plath and her beat-writer friends William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. As she noted in her 2010 memoir Just Kids, when it came to making music, poetry was her 'guiding principle'. Horses was, for her, 'three-chord rock merged with the power of word'. Prior to releasing the album, Smith had taken her first steps as a recording artist with a cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' in 1974, about a man on the run after killing his wife, but with the murderous protagonist replaced by the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. It was decent, but it was the B-side that gave a glimpse of what was to come. 'Piss Factory', a raw, incantatory track that started out as a poem, and that recalled her time working in a New Jersey factory aged 16, was Smith's cri de coeur against production-line drudgery. She had been mercilessly bullied by her colleagues, who were annoyed by her insistence on carrying a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations in her back pocket and instructed her to leave it at home. When she refused, they dunked her head in a toilet bowl of urine to teach her a lesson. Smith's lyrics on Horses would prove similarly visceral, never more so than in the opener 'Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)', a reworking of a Them B-side that wove in excerpts from Smith's poem 'Oath' and began with the electrifying refrain: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine'. More than just a rejection of religion, it was a perfect distillation of Smith's spirit: hypnotic, primal, uncompromising. Elsewhere on the album, there are tales of female suicide (in the reggae-inflected 'Redondo Beach', wrongly interpreted as a same-sex love song at the time), alien visitations ('Birdland') and a dream in which Jim Morrison of The Doors is bound like Prometheus on a marble slab, only to break free ('Break It Up'). In 'Free Money', the most straightforwardly propulsive rock song on the album, she dreams about winning the lottery, climbing out of poverty and 'buy[ing] you a jet plane, baby'. Horses was recorded at Electric Lady Studios, near Smith's New York apartment. Among the musicians were Kaye, Television's Tom Verlaine, Allen Lanier, Smith's then boyfriend from Blue Öyster Cult, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and Richard Sohl on keyboards. Together, they fashioned a spiky garage-rock sound partly honed during live performances at the soon-to-be punk mecca CBGB, and that would become the signature sound of the late 1970s scene. John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the producer, encouraged improvisation in the studio and avoided smoothing the band's rough edges. Even so, he and Smith clashed repeatedly during the five-week recording, with Smith saying it was 'like [Rimbaud's] A Season in Hell' for them both. Cale later recalled the experience of working with her as 'confrontational, and a lot like an immutable force meeting an immovable object'. Smith's transgressive spirit also inhabited the cover image, which reinforced her 'beyond gender' approach. Taken by Mapplethorpe and shot in black and white at a penthouse apartment owned by the art curator Sam Wagstaff, it showed an androgynous-looking Smith in white shirt and slacks, a jacket slung insouciantly over her shoulder as if she were the sixth member of the rat pack. When Smith's label, Arista, suggested the hair on Smith's upper lip be airbrushed out, they might as well have asked her to don heels and a sparkly dress. She instructed them to leave it be. When Horses came out on 10 November (the death date of her beloved Rimbaud), Smith had already published several poetry collections and was making money writing for music magazines including Creem and Rolling Stone. In her early years in New York with Mapplethorpe, the pair had lived in squalor and often couldn't afford to eat, but by now she was comparatively solvent. With her album finished, she imagined she would keep on writing and perhaps go back to working in the bookstore. As she told an interviewer in 2007, rock'n'roll was something she was 'just gonna do for a little while and then get back to work'. What she didn't bet on was the album's rapturous reception, which led to requests for her to perform all over the world and to record more music (one of the few dissenting voices was that of Greil Marcus, who snippily declared: 'If you're going to mess around with the kind of stuff Buñuel, Dali and Rimbaud were putting out, you have to come up with a lot more than an homage'). In the five years after Horses was released, Smith would make three more albums including 1978's Easter, her most commercially successful LP. Easter included the single 'Because the Night', an air-punching ode to love and hedonism that was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It remains Smith's biggest hit. Fans accused her of selling out, but she was unrepentant. She told New York Magazine: 'I liked hearing myself on the radio. To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom.' To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom Patti Smith Smith was still on a commercial high when, in the late 1970s, she retreated from the limelight. By this time, she had met her husband, Fred 'Sonic' Smith of the Detroit band MC5, and was pregnant with their first child. For the next 15 years, she would concentrate on raising their two children; aside from 1988's Dream of Life, made with her spouse, there would be no new music. But then, in 1989, her former soulmate Mapplethorpe died from an Aids-related illness at 42. Five years later, her husband and her brother both died within a month of each other; both were in their forties. As the sole breadwinner, Smith had no choice but to go back to work. Now 78, Smith has outlived most of her New York contemporaries, bar Kaye, who still performs with her, and Cale, with whom she has long made up since those fraught Horses sessions. Her work transcends not just genres but mediums too. The last 15 years have seen her triumph as a memoirist: the award-winning Just Kids, a chronicle of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, is a bona fide masterpiece, a poetic account of youthful love, and a deliciously grimy portrait of the late 20th-century New York scene where music, art and literature collided and culture was remade. Her two subsequent memoirs, 2015's M Train and 2019's Year of the Monkey, provide portraits of the latter-day Smith: always writing, photographing, performing, tending to her cats and paying loving tribute to the artists, dead and alive, who paved the way. Not for nothing does she have the rare distinction of having been awarded an Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by France's ministry of culture for her poetry and, for her musical achievements, a place in America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The influence of Smith on successive generations cannot be overstated: The Clash, Sonic Youth, Madonna, Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Florence Welch, The Raincoats, Bikini Kill and The Waterboys' Mike Scott have all talked of their debt to her. Stipe said that when he heard Horses, it 'tore my limbs off and put them back in a whole new order'. Go to her concerts now, and you'll see old punks standing in rapturous communion alongside teenage and twentysomething fans all celebrating Smith: an accidental icon and rock's most remarkable renaissance woman. 'People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith' is at New York's Carnegie Hall on 26 March. Smith performs 'Horses' in full at the London Palladium on 12 and 13 October. Tickets here.
BBC News
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'It proved the US's biggest gangsta rapper could be vulnerable': How Tupac wrote the ultimate anthem for single mothers
The iconic 90s hip-hop artist was known for his pained intensity. But Dear Mama, a tribute to his mother Afeni, showed off his softer side – and still brings listeners to tears. "Not everyone is so lucky and gets to experience the love of a mother for a long time," explains DJ Master Tee, whose words are staggered due to deep emotion, before he starts to cry down the phone. "A lot of people's mothers died way too early… and I think Tupac Shakur understood that well," the producer continues. "He didn't just want to make a song that celebrated the mothers who are here, but also the ones that passed away." DJ Master Tee made the original silky-smooth beat (which was later adapted by co-producer Tony Pizarro) for Dear Mama, the late rap legend Tupac's candid tribute to the many sacrifices of his single mother Afeni Shakur. She was an activist in the radical political group The Black Panthers, who subsequently struggled with drug addiction and to make ends meet while raising her two children. This song is the pained yet ultimately joyful epicentre of Tupac's otherwise death-obsessed third studio album, Me Against the World, which was released 30 years ago this month. In the context of an album where Tupac shifts from suicidal (So Many Tears) to grief-stricken (Lord Knows), repeatedly using the word "hopeless", Dear Mama feels like uncovering a diamond at the bottom of a pitch-black mine. "Even as a crack phene, momma / You always were a black queen, momma," he famously rapped. This lyric alone represented a radical shift in rap storytelling in the way it represented victims of the so-called Crack Era, when use of the drug soared across the US during the 1980s and 90s. Previously, rap artists had stripped away the humanity of crack addicts via slurs such as "basehead" and "zombie". But, Tee says, Tupac saw addicts "as victims of the state, who needed our support". And although Tupac expresses sadness over a childhood with little money – where he and his sister Sekyiwa observed the matriarch of their family descend into the hell of addiction – he leads with empathy for Afeni Shakur's struggle. He chants out all his words with a bear-hug warmth, confirming that he never stopped seeing Afeni as a superhero. In celebrating her, Tupac serves to pay respect to the struggle of single mothers everywhere, as well as mothers full stop – a sentiment the whole world can appreciate. This is reflected in the numbers, with the song racking up over 345 million streams on Spotify alone. Indeed, Dear Mama remains one of the rapper's most celebrated tracks: in 2009, it became the first song by a solo rapper to be inducted into the US Library of Congress's National Recording Registry, awarded for its profound cultural significance. "It really doesn't matter if you grew up in the ghetto or not, because Dear Mama transcends all of that," explains the song's engineer, Paul Arnold. "You could be rich, poor, black, white, brown, whatever; you'll find a way to relate to the song. Honestly, it's difficult for me to even talk about it and not get choked up. It forces you to think about your own mother and that isn't always easy. Behind all the controversy, it was obvious he was a very emotional guy." A revolutionary mother To properly explore the creation of this song, you must follow the roots of the woman who inspired it. Born in North Carolina in 1947, Afeni Shakur (whose birth name was Alice Faye Williams) was confronted with racism from the start. This was a time where Jim Crow laws around racial segregation were bluntly enforced. Afeni's family moved to the Bronx when she was 11. Despite living in the diverse melting pot of New York City, she felt she was part of a system designed to push black people to the bottom of US society. She found solace hanging around local street gangs (including the Gangster Disciples) and subscribed to the "by any means necessary" approach of activist Malcolm X, who preached that black Americans should violently resist their oppressors in sharp contrast to Martin Luther King's celebrated pacifism. After seeing the co-founder of the Black Panther party Bobby Seale speak at a political rally in 1968, Afeni was inspired enough to join, telling The New York Times in 1970 she was impressed by the way he spoke of the homeless leading their revolution: "I'd never seen that before." Afeni quickly rose through the ranks of the Black Panthers, pioneering a free breakfast plan for hungry schoolchildren and starting a protest campaign against exploitative landlords. The party won high-profile enemies including FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who ran surveillance on key members (resulting in the 1969 assassination of radical deputy chairman Fred Hampton) and considered the group a threat to the status-quo. In 1971, Afeni was one of 21 Black Panther members indicted by a New York grand jury, accused of plotting to shoot police officers. From prison Afeni maintained a position of strength, writing in one unapologetic letter to the media: "We know that we live in a world inhuman in its poverty. We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The US that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. We have no respect for your laws, taxes, your gratitude, sincerity, honour and dignity. You don't respect us – thus we don't respect YOU." This defiance and righteous anger would be something her future son would directly channel into his rap career. Heavily pregnant and facing a 300-year prison sentence, Afeni refused legal counsel, choosing to represent herself in what was then the most expensive trial in the history of New York State. Despite the bleak odds, she won her freedom and was the driving force behind the Panthers being acquitted on all 156 counts. Born a month after the trial ended, her son Tupac Amaru was named after the Peruvian warrior who led the largest anti-colonial rebellion in Spanish American History. Right from his birth on 16 June 1971, Afeni's boy had revolution and black nationalism pulsing through his veins. Tupac's complex childhood Growing up in East Harlem, Tupac was often surrounded by enemies of the state. His stepfather Mutulu Shakur and step-aunt Assata Shakur were political rebels on the FBI's Most Wanted List. A paranoid Afeni also taught her son how to spot undercover federal agents lurking outside their apartment building by observing their shaky body language and suspect sunglasses. If Tupac ever misbehaved, he would be punished by being forced to read The New York Times cover-to-cover. His knowledge of global politics was at an advanced level long before his 10th birthday, and while the other kids read comic books, Tupac was learning how fear is more powerful than respect through reading Machiavelli's The Prince. He also admired how his mother, to quote lyrics from Dear Mama, "made miracles every Thanksgiving" – cooking a wholesome meal despite working multiple jobs and living off welfare food stamps. Afeni had on-off partners who served as role models to Tupac, but he never really had a stable father figure in his life, with biological dad (and fellow Black Panther) Billy Garland largely absent until later years. When the Black Panthers disbanded, Afeni, like so many of her peers, struggled to readjust to mainstream society. Years of being accosted by police led to her suffering PTSD, and during a choppy childhood living in New York, Baltimore, and Marin City, California, Tupac watched his mother's sharp decline. She increasingly self-medicated with drugs to alleviate her pain. A talented actor who could quote Shakespeare at will, Tupac secured a place at the coveted Baltimore School of the Arts. It helped push him away from trouble and family drama. But when the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area due to financial problems, Tupac's academic hopes dissolved into the ether. Converting the poetry he wrote to process childhood trauma into chart-topping raps became Tupac's main focus; he saw himself as that rare rose which could grow through the harshness of the inner-city concrete. Former DJ Billy Dee first met Tupac early on in his rap career, back when he was a member of the funk hip-hop collective the Digital Underground. They bonded during a 1989 tour that brought the group over to Berlin, where Dee's family was also based. "He hated the German food and the big sausages," she recalls. "I invited him back to my mom's house and she cooked him fried chicken. My mom was a single mother and I remember he liked that about her a lot." She continues: "If you were with him, he would literally die to protect you. But he was so radically smart, too. My mom had photos with Yasser Arafat on the wall. Tupac, even as a young man, knew exactly who that was and spoke passionately during our lunch about supporting the historical struggle of the Palestinian state." A student of political emcees like Chuck D and Ice Cube, Tupac had similarly socially conscious lyrics, which passionately furthered Bobby Seale's dream of a black community where should someone fall down, everyone else served as their crutches. He quickly was signed to Interscope Records and, on Tupac's stirring 1991 debut album 2Pacalypse Now, the gut punch of a rap fable Brenda's Got a Baby told the story of a teenage black girl who faces horrific neglect and abuse. It's Dickensian in its three-dimensional dissection of society's most forgotten casualties. Yet the rising artist was also a magnet for controversy, and many couldn't get past the palpable contradictions in his music. For every bluesy song that advocated women having full autonomy over their bodies (Keep Ya Head Up) or preached unity within gang neighbourhoods, there were more nihilistic street anthems where Tupac referred to women using offensive slurs and glorified shooting crooked cops. It was unclear whether he wanted to lead the revolution or simply press the self-destruct button. From firing at two off-duty police officers harassing a black motorist (the charges were later dropped) in Atlanta, to callously slapping film director Allen Hughes for daring to fire the rapper and actor from the cast of 1993's Menace II Society, a fatalistic Tupac was often in the newspapers more for controversy than actual music. Going into the creation of his third solo album, Me Against the World, the artist desperately needed a song that showed a softer side. 'Drop something for my momma' DJ Master Tee remembers the night he gave Tupac the beat to Dear Mama well. After Tupac had just come off stage doing a landmark freestyle at New York's Madison Square Garden alongside then-friend and fellow rapper The Notorious B.I.G. Backstage, Tee gave the rapper a cassette filled with beats. It didn't take long until Tupac called him up, excited about one particular instrumental that was built around an interpretation of jazz keyboardist Joe Sample's soothing In All My Wildest Dreams. Master Tee had flipped this song's lovelorn, slowly caressed keys by matching them with raw vinyl scratches. Tee knew his use of this sample would trigger something deep within Tupac and he likens its tone to a sunny afternoon spent reminiscing over family photos. On the original version, which was recorded in October 1993, Tupac opens by saying: "Yo, Master Tee, drop something for my momma!" Tee says the words flowed out of Tupac with "real ease" in the studio. In a 1995 interview with the LA Times, Tupac said he had wanted to make the rap equivalent of Don McLean's Vincent. "So it came out like this deep love ballad," Tee says. "He was a machine with it! He would do a full song with three or four verses as well as a bridge and hook in one take, and it would sound perfect. I also worked with Prince and Tupac reminded me of him. They were both workaholics, who you never saw yawn once. There was a mission behind the music!" More like this:• Kendrick Lamar's road to the Superbowl• The provocative 80s rap that became an anthem• The party that started hip-hop In 2023, Master Tee, aka Terrence Thomas, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against parties including Tupac's record label Interscope and its parent company Universal Music Group claiming he was "never properly and fully credited with his publishing copyright from the writing and creation of the music of Dear Mama". Last year, it was reported, Universal Music began the process of seeking the claim's dismissal. Engineer Paul Arnold, alongside the producer Tony Pizarro, was later asked by the label to make the song more timeless and radio-friendly. Although they kept the beat's foundational sample, they added regal violins as well as a syrupy R&B hook that interpreted the song Sadie by Motown group The Spinners. "They didn't like what we turned in at first," recalls Arnold. "But we persuaded them to live with it overnight. The next day we got a call like: 'Don't touch it!'" Arnold met Tupac a few times in New York's Quad Studios and was impressed by the way he took time to speak to everybody and hear out their life story. "He'd be interested enough to listen to the life story of the guy bringing in the coffee," Arnold says. Tupac tended to stack his vocals, recording three or four separate versions of the same verse, combining the various voices so his presence was more commanding and carried an eerie pull. It resulted in a voice that was gigantic and filled with duelling layers of pain; the raps were bellowed out like an ancient mountain-top God shouting down prophecies to his followers. However, Dear Mama was the rare track where Tupac had insisted on only one vocal track. "One of the reasons his voice sounds softer than usual on Dear Mama is because we pulled back on the vocal layering," Arnold explains. "We wanted Tupac's voice to have more of a direct feel, so it's like a one-on-one conversation." Tupac, who raps: "I finally understand for a woman it ain't easy trying to raise a man," recognised that it was single mothers who shouldered the extra burdens working class boys racked up during their transition into men. He also pleaded for troubled young black males to forgive their mothers for any hardships, finding a way to exchange grudges for love and deep-rooted appreciation. "Dear Mama proved that even the biggest gangsta rapper in America with Thug Life tattooed on his chest could still be super vulnerable," says Arnold, who believes the fact Tupac's vocals sound on the edge of tears remains the song's biggest strength. "He really was more like a preacher than a rapper. He knew crying made you more of a man. I got to meet Afeni, when I worked on posthumous Tupac music later on. When we met, she gave me the biggest hug. All the love that's inside Dear Mama made more sense to me after that." The purgative Dear Mama was a big hit, reaching the peak of the Billboard Rap Songs chart, just as the album went to number one too; it was accompanied by a music video, featuring Afeni beaming with pride while looking through old photos of her son. It's still part of the cultural conversation years later: in 2023, FX released a TV docu-series bearing the song's name and focusing on Afeni and Tupac's rollercoaster relationship. At the time of Dear Mama's release in 1995, Tupac was imprisoned on sexual assault charges, which he always vigorously denied, and still nursing five bullet wounds sustained in an ambush while visiting the same studio where he'd laid down Dear Mama vocals. The world didn't know whether to see him as a pariah or an outlaw. A lot has been made of the period that followed its release: Tupac was eventually bailed out of prison by the notorious Death Row Records's CEO Suge Knight pending an appeal of his conviction, and his music took a more war-ready stance, culminating in his murder in a drive-by shooting on 7 September 1996 in Las Vegas. Yet for DJ Master Tee, it's Dear Mama that best represents Tupac's humanity. "It's a really simple song and it's very catchy, but this allowed it to resonate with more people," he says. "It's a song that will outlive us all. Whenever the grieving press play on Dear Mama, they'll instantly be able to recall what a mother's embrace feels like." This tribute to the dead was confirmed by a live performance of Dear Mama at a 1996 Mother's Day charity benefit organised by Death Row Records for single mothers. The rapper explained to the cheering crowd: "[With this song] I want to talk about the people who don't got mommas anymore. We sometimes forget to appreciate our mothers! But my little homie Mutah [Beale, who was a member of Tupac's Outlaw Immortalz collective and, as a toddler, watched his parents get murdered in the family living room] hasn't got no mother today. He can't share in our smiles." It all goes back to something Tupac says on the song's third verse: "And there's no way I can pay you back / But my plan is to show you that I understand." This proves Dear Mama isn't just a song, but more a ritual; a sonic safe space for the listener to sit still and reminisce on their mother's sacrifices. As Arnold concludes: "Tupac immortalises a mother's love and their willingness to do whatever it takes to ensure their child is doing alright. That will always be powerful, no matter who you are." The FX docuseries Dear Mama is available to watch on Disney+ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Patti Smith to perform Horses in full on 50th anniversary tour
Patti Smith is to perform her classic album Horses in full on a tour to mark the album's 50th anniversary. Playing gigs across the US, UK and Europe, Smith's band will feature guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, each of whom played on the original recording. The tour includes two UK dates, at London's Palladium on 12 and 13 October, with Dublin, Madrid, Bergamo, Brussels, Oslo and Paris also featuring on the European run. The US tour will visit Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia. Horses was Smith's 1975 debut album, and came to be seen as a foundational text in New York's punk scene, although Smith rejected the term punk, instead describing Horses as 'three-chord rock merged with the power of the word'. Featuring a portrait by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover, Horses has long been regarded as one of the decade's great albums, and is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress. Horses will also be commemorated with a tribute concert at New York's Carnegie Hall on 26 March, featuring stars such Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, the National's Matt Berninger, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and Sharon Van Etten who will perform album tracks backed by a band including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea. Smith has weathered bouts of ill health in recent years, including on tour. In January she collapsed while on stage in Brazil after experiencing a migraine over several days. In December 2023, she was hospitalised while in Italy and cancelled tour dates there after being told by doctors to rest. But her live performances remain as spirited and distinctive as ever, with the Guardian's Alexis Petridis describing a June 2024 concert as 'moving, powerful and unexpected, a perfect reminder that, 12 years after her last album, Patti Smith is still in constant motion.' October 6 Dublin – 3Arena 8 Madrid – Teatro Real 10 Bergamo – Chorus Life Arena 12, 13 London – The Palladium 15, 16 Brussels – Cirque Royale 18 Oslo – Sentrum Scene 20, 21 Paris – L'Olympia November 10 Seattle – Paramount theatre 12 Oakland – The Fox theatre 13 San Francisco – The Masonic 15 Los Angeles – Walt Disney Concert Hall 17 Chicago – Chicago theatre 21, 22 New York City – The Beacon 24 Boston – Orpheum theatre 28 Washington DC – The Anthem 29 Philadelphia – The Met
