AAVE Features in the lyrics of Tupac Shakur: The notion of “Realness”

Abstract

Tupac Shakur was an artist who worked in a range of verbal media and was fluent in registers tailored to communicating with vastly different audiences. Tupac was an amateur poet and platinum-selling rapper when he died; however, his success was most visible in his work as a rapper in which he used African American Vernacular English (AAVE) linguistic features copiously. This paper will examine texts of Tupac's transcribed rap lyrics and interviews as well as his poetry to compare his usage of AAVE features. We will analyze these three corpora in an attempt to define the linguistic differences and similarities among Tupac's poetry, speech and raps, and we will propose that the notion of “keeping it real” explains why he chose to use AAVE features in his raps and speech. We will end by arguing that Tupac Shakur was fluent in the language “of the street” and the language “of poetry” and used each for different artistic purposes and to reach distinct audiences.