For 30 years, Angie Martinez kept the loudest parts of her 1996 Tupac Shakur interview off the air. On November 27, Netflix will stream them as The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez, a four-part video podcast built around previously unreleased portions of that conversation.
Netflix announced the series on November 11 alongside a trailer and a Q&A with Martinez on its own Tudum site. The recording dates from months before Shakur died in September 1996, when he was 25. Martinez says she cut it herself back then, at the station, with a razor blade.
Why the tapes stayed in a drawer
Martinez is blunt about her reasons. “For a long time, I didn’t feel comfortable releasing the tapes,” she told Netflix. “There were things said in that conversation that could have hurt people, damaged relationships, and added fuel to an already dangerous situation.”
She aired the sections she felt carried his core message, chiefly that he was not at war with all of New York. The rest stayed private. After his death, she said, she “felt a responsibility to protect something that was never meant to become his final statement.”
So why now? “These tapes were bigger than me,” she said, adding that the difference today is the chance to present them with context rather than simply play “the most explosive moments and let people react.”
How a video invite became an interview
The meeting started with a request she turned down. Shakur reached out about having her appear in his “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” video. She said no, but on the phone he explained that his issues were not with the whole city, and she thought listeners needed to hear that from him. He invited her to his home in Los Angeles, and he had New York pizza waiting when she arrived.
She remembers him as “passionate, emotional, funny, angry, brilliant,” sometimes all at once.
Who joins her on the panel
Netflix lists RZA, Dream Hampton, Joe Budden, Charlamagne Tha God, Wallo and Big Boy as guests reflecting on Shakur’s life and impact. Martinez said she did not want “a room full of people just agreeing with each other,” and picked voices who were around at the time or had different relationships with him.
Context: where Martinez stood in 1996
Readers outside New York may not know the host. According to her Wikipedia biography, Martinez started answering request lines at Hot 97 as a teenager in 1986, spent 28 years at the station, moved to Power 105.1 in 2014 and entered the Radio Hall of Fame in 2020. In 1996 she was still early in that run, which makes her decision to sit on a scoop of this size more striking: a young host chose to bury the most quotable parts of the most talked-about rapper of the year.
The timing also fits a busy stretch for Shakur’s story on screen. Badiyaa has covered how Cynthia Erivo will play Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur in the Snoop Dogg biopic, and how Aaron Paul joined the same film as Jimmy Iovine. The Netflix series is different: it is his own voice, not a recreation.
What she hopes viewers hear
Martinez says the recording shows more hurt than people expect. “There are moments that are uncomfortable,” she said. “There are things he says that I don’t agree with, and things that I think deserve to be challenged.”
She was on the radio the day he died and had to tell listeners the news. Her goal for the series is simple: “I hope people leave with a greater sense of empathy.”
All four parts of The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez arrive on Netflix on November 27, and the service rates it TV-MA.
Further reading
Image: Shaun Dawson, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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