“I hear Brenda’s got a baby, but Brenda’s barely got a brain.”
These are the opening words of Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and they are among the more potent and evocative opening salvos in the history of hip-hop music. The tragedy is that Brenda barely has a brain. Or as Pac later mentions, “She’s only 12 years old.” So her lack of a brain is a symbol of her innocence. It is also a critique of a society that has not done its best to educate Brenda or to put her in a position where she can succeed. Brenda has not been nurtured and taught the rules for survival: her father is a junkie, he mother is disinterested, her cousin is molesting her. There is no authority figure that can steer her right and in fact they do everything they can to hurt her. This is also the tragedy.
“A damn shame, the girl can hardly spell her name.”
Normally the birth of a new life is the herald of a new beginning and also a continuation. The irony is that Brenda has a baby and it is a damn shame. Is this what the world has come to? When normally a case for joy and excitement the baby becomes just another part of the trap. It becomes a curse and a burden. This is why it is so easy for Brenda to toss out the problem in a dumpster like so much garbage. But not for long and Brenda is drawn back by an external (and also surely some sort of internal) call. She notices the baby’s eyes so she recognizes her own soul and that of another. Brenda may not have a brain but she has a heart — the two rarely go hand in hand in the luckiest individuals, as they do with with Tupac Shakur.
“That’s not our problem, that’s up to Brenda’s family.”
The third bar. Money B raises the choral voice of the gallery. He delivers a commonly-uttered moral distancing and ritual cleansing of hands. He expresses the path of least resistance. But he also begins an important dialogue with Tupac that will be carried out in the form of an episodic story. This dialogue represents a chance for understanding and change, a path marked by struggle towards sanctity. It is an anti-traditional dialogue as it is composed of one extended verse and no more. Formally speaking, “Brenda’s Got a Baby” is a very experimental song — though not a cold exercise in aesthetics. Tupac is at his warmest and most soulful in this song at this early stage of his career. He displays his sensitive concern for the world around him and also, always details the plight of (and his love for) black children and the tragic irony some are born into.
We follow Brenda from age 12 to a single mother to a failed drug dealer and finally, a murdered prostitute. This narrative is compressed and elliptical so we never learn with any degree of accuracy how much time has passed or how old Brenda is. The possibility is left open that not much time has passed at all (indeed alluded to formally) and Brenda’s dramatic curve could very well have taken place all before she even becomes a teenager. This is the poisonous cycle one must extricate oneself from because as Pac says, “Just cause you’re in the ghetto doesn’t mean you can’t grow.”
“Well let me show you how it affects the whole community.”
Tupac enlargens the context and stitches together a social fabric that reveals the order and consequence of things. This bar reveals a key method to Pac’s entire career. When he speaks he speaks for the whole community. Or rather he speaks to the whole community. He engages the gallery represented by Money B in a discussion that will unnerve and also enlighten. When Tupac is at his best is when he is delivering incisive commentary on the existing society around him. This is why though “Me Against the World” is a masterpiece of an album it may not be a better work of art than “2pacalypse Now” (not just because Brenda appears on this album).
When Pac shows you how things affect the whole community he is connecting with the spirit and aims of past Tupac Amarus (I and II) in the 16th and 18th centuries who pulled the curtain back on Peruvian society under the Spanish Conquistadors and led their (indigenous) people in revolts against the dominant and repressive structures. Of course both of these Tupac Amarus — the Incan king and his descendant — were beheaded in their times. And Tupac Amaru III in his eventual time in the 20th century would also be assassinated by his enemies, screaming like Amaru I, “Mother Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood!” And as the award-winning Peruvian poet Alejandro Romualdo wrote in lyricizing the song of Amaru II (and surely predicting the common fate of the bearers of the namesake), “They will want to break him and will not be able to break him. They will want to kill him and will not be able to kill him.” He foresees a resurrection in his poem, as Amaru III often does in his lyrical poetry when he regularly states that his only fear of death is reincarnation. And if this rebirth has continued through the centuries one wonders who will next inherit the spirit and name “Tupac Amaru” — would only we all live to see, and that he or she does not end wrapped up in a trash heap like Brenda’s baby.
These first four bars in Tupac’s song represent one of the first great tragedies constructed in hip-hop music. A modern play of tragic irony as afflicts the hip-hop generation. This is the chaotic and criminal environment that Pac’s people exist in. This is the trap in which they must seek the door to the control room in order not to escape, but instead to subvert the process. Most people (and artists) would seek the door to the exit from the trap (the path of least resistance again, because anything else is not our problem). Pac seeks access to the tower because he is an artist that shows you how we are all connected. He is an artist that shouts, “Freedom!” And as Romualdo writes, “He shall be back.”