In 1996, New York radio personality Angie Martinez flew to Los Angeles for an interview with Tupac Shakur. The conversation originated with the rapper, who suggested it be hosted in his home. There were some things he wanted to get off his chest. Some parts of the conversation made Martinez feel uneasy at the thought of airing them, so she shared select segments but kept most of the conversation buried at the time. A few months later, Shakur was murdered. Now, Martinez is brushing the dust off one of the rapper’s final interviews with The Tupac Tapes.
The four-part podcast series hosted by Martinez will premiere Nov. 27 on Netflix. It will mark the first time her complete interview with Shakur is heard by the public, 30 years after it took place. “There were things said in that conversation that could have hurt people, damaged relationships, and added fuel to an already dangerous situation,” Martinez told Tudum. “I chose not to release the more inflammatory parts. After Pac died, it became even more complicated. I felt a responsibility to protect something that was never meant to become his final statement.”
Martinez began her career at Hot 97, a staple in New York media. The parts of the interview she did air at the time spotlighted Shakur’s insistence that, despite what the hip-hop landscape might have suggested at the time, he wasn’t at war with the entire East Coast. The official trailer for The Tupac Tapes offers a glimpse into the parts that were omitted.
“I’ve done more for credibility in hip-hop than any fucking artist,” Shakur says in one clip. In another, he pushes back on Martinez, who’d started to say there were people who showed him love before the rapper cut her off. “Where’s the fucking love?” he asked. “Just because they didn’t kill me? What love?”
When Shakur was killed shortly after, at the age of 25, Martinez was on shift at the station and shared the news on air. “It was one of the most emotional moments of my career,” she said. “I think about that whenever I think about the real human cost of everything that was happening. More than anything, I hope people leave with a greater sense of empathy. Because behind all the headlines, the records, the rivalries, and the mythology, there were real people. And the consequences were real.”
Last month, former Compton gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison after being convicted of orchestrating the September 1996 murder of Shakur amid escalating East Coast-West Coast rap rivalries.
The Tupac Tapes will include appearances from hip-hop experts and figures including Dream Hampton, RZA, Big Boy, Joe Budden, Charlamagne tha God, Monie Love, Bootleg Kev, Erica Ford, and more who will help contextualize the decades-old interview. In deciding who would take on that role, Martinez wanted to prioritize “people who were there, people who understood the culture, people who had different relationships with Pac, and people who could challenge the way we remember that time.”
Speaking about the decision to release the tapes, Martinez said, “They’re a piece of hip-hop history, and I don’t think they should just sit in my possession forever. The difference now is that I have the opportunity to share them with context. Not just play the most explosive moments and let people react, but really examine what was happening, why it was happening, and what we can understand differently today.”
Elliott Smith in 2003.
Why Is Everyone So Mad at Supreme’s Elliott Smith Collaboration?
Earlier this week, Supreme announced an Elliott Smith capsule collection, including a selection of jackets and T-shirts featuring artwork from across the late musician’s career, from his self-titled 1995 album to his seminal 1997 album Either/Or to 1998’s XO and 2000’s Figure 8.
The internet seems to be in a huff over this, relying on a view of Supreme and streetwear frozen in 2008 that was, even then, embarrassingly myopic. The line of thinking goes that Supreme, the brand that was founded in New York in 1994 by designer James Jebbia and that has been a staple in skate and streetwear culture ever since, is an inauthentic purveyor of the ethos represented by Smith and his music. One might cite the brand’s roughly $500 million investment from the Carlyle Group in 2017 or its association with high fashion as disqualifying characteristics. More than anything, there seems to be a sense that taking shots at a nearly 40-year-old streetwear institution is a way to prove one’s unsullied dedication to a sense of anti-consumerism. The anger is misplaced.
In a culture awash in goofy collaborations and corporate cash grabs, Supreme might be one of the few brands still operating from an actual set of beliefs. Its Elliott Smith capsule (which was made with permission from Smith’s estate) is in a long line of collaborations that Supreme has done with musicians. Its first artist collaborator was Rammellzee, the experimental rapper and visual artist whose relationship with the brand dates to 1994, the year Supreme opened. By 2005, Raekwon was posing with a Tickle Me Elmo for the first of Supreme’s commissioned portrait T-shirts. Across its music collaborations, portrait tees, and tributes, the list includes everyone from Michael Jackson to the Velvet Underground, Nirvana, Butthole Surfers, My Bloody Valentine, Daniel Johnston, Aphex Twin, and SALEM.
There have been collections with record labels like Stax, Wackies, Rap-A-Lot, Ruff Ryders, Jah Life, and Duck Down, the last of which put Black Moon and Smif-N-Wessun’s album artwork on clothes. There are shirts and shoes with Peter Saville’s artwork for Joy Division and New Order. The Smith collaboration is so patently in the wheelhouse of what the brand has done for decades that bringing it up now as some sort of “gotcha!” feels more like a product of social media’s tilt towards rage-bait than any defense of an artist.
Elliott Smith, who died in 2003 at 34, has long been a part of skate culture. He was friends with Mike Mills, the skateboarder and filmmaker who designed graphics for Stereo and one of Supreme’s early logos. Mills worked on unused cover art for Figure 8 and later enlisted Smith to record music for his film Thumbsucker. And Smith’s music has been celebrated in the world of skateboarding for many years now. Mark Baines skated to “Happiness” in Blueprint’s Waiting for the World in 2000. Nate Broussard used “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free” in Static III in 2007. Dylan Rieder skated to “Coast to Coast” in Alien Workshop’s Mind Field in 2009, and Mark Suciu used “Junk Bond Trader” in Cross Continental in 2012.
Arguing that he would have hated the collaboration, aside from being infantilizing, completely ignores the actual culture around Elliott Smith when he was alive, instead opting for some abstract representation of a person who actually existed in the real world — a particularly Gen Z problem, to be frank.
With these collaborations, estates and relevant parties are always compensated. And that actually matters in an era where an artist can remain a staple for young people for generations, long after they’ve died, while reaping diminishing returns thanks to the paltry payouts from streamers. Meaning, short of throwing him onstage as a hologram or doling out money-grabbing box sets, a tasteful collection with a brand with a real connection to his work is actually one of the better options that exists.
People who want to be mad at Supreme want to separate themselves from some sort of mainstream idea of cool. They want to believe that they have an authenticity that Supreme doesn’t. Sorry to say, the reverse is more likely true. Just last week, Business of Fashion published a report on the brand’s cultural durability. “Supreme isn’t cool anymore” is, in fact, a very uncool thing to say in 2026. And beyond that, the people inside the company are coming from an ethos that has remained steadfast in actually supporting youth culture.
To sit on the outside now and pretend that you’re such an authentic Elliott Smith fan that you’re upset by this is simply to expose how out of touch you are.