Thug Life

                I hope this post doesn’t sound biased in any way but Tupac is the one of the greatest minds to every touch a microphone in my opinion so talking about him brought forth great joy for me. Tupac was one of the most diverse musical artists ever. What he always managed to be labeled as is showing a form of hyper-masculinity. The first connection was with the “cool pose” and “thug life.” The cool pose/thug life was kind of a contradiction and seemed fake because growing up he was heavily involved with theater. It wasn’t however because he had a relatively hard life. His mother was a drug user and a convict. His father was never in his life. He had the ingredients of that of a “tough guy” life. I want to focus more on the cool pose. In the video “Beyond Beats and Rhymes”, rapper Mos Def said that he had to hide his knowledge so he wouldn’t be harassed by his peers. He also talked about how as a man, if someone was to challenge you, you had to respond. I can relate to that completely because how I grew up, it didn’t matter if you knew you were gonna lose a fight; you had to fight so you didn’t look like a punk. The debates in class were heated and I felt that this is a topic that a lot of people either read or learned the most. The posts on twitter let me know that a lot of people truly learned about the “cool pose” and hyper-masculinity.