Changes

Hook

There is a version of 2Pac that schools are comfortable with. He appears in slide decks about social justice, in assembly presentations, in playlists built by people who would never put on All Eyez on Me. That version of him is almost entirely the product of one song.

And that song is a leftover.

"Changes" was recorded in 1992, when Tupac Shakur was twenty-one years old and had exactly one album to his name. It was reportedly passed over, left in a vault, and sat there through everything that followed: the films, the court cases, the prison sentence, the Death Row years, the feuds, the shooting on a Las Vegas street in September 1996 that ended his life at twenty-five. It only reached the public in late 1998, when the people managing his estate reworked it, added a sung chorus, and put it out as the lead single from a posthumous Greatest Hits collection.

So the most widely heard, most institutionally approved, most quoted 2Pac song in the world is one he never signed off on as a single, never performed live, and never saw chart. He had moved on from it years before it made him respectable.

Background

He was born Lesane Parish Crooks in East Harlem in June 1971, and renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur after an eighteenth-century Andean revolutionary. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a Black Panther who had defended herself in a New York conspiracy trial and was acquitted only weeks before he was born. His stepfather and godfather were both revolutionaries who ended up imprisoned or underground. Radical politics was not an interest he picked up later; it was the furniture of his childhood home.

What is less often mentioned is the other half of his education. As a teenager in Baltimore he attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting, poetry and, reportedly, ballet, and where his classmates included a young Jada Pinkett. He read Shakespeare and Hesse. He wrote poems in notebooks. That training is audible in everything he later recorded, in the theatrical breath control, the ability to hold a line, the sense that every verse is being performed rather than merely rapped.

The family moved west to Marin City, California, and he found his way into the Bay Area rap group Digital Underground, first as a dancer and roadie, then as a guest voice. His solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now, arrived in 1991 and was denounced from a podium by the sitting US Vice President. By 1992 he was starring in Juice, writing a second album, and becoming simultaneously famous and marked.

That is the year "Changes" comes from. It is the year of the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles uprising, the peak of the crack economy and the enforcement machinery built around it, two years before the federal crime bill that would reshape American incarceration. The song was produced by Deon Evans and built around a sample of Bruce Hornsby and the Range's 1986 hit "The Way It Is", a piano ballad whose own subject is the gap between civil rights legislation and the attitudes it failed to change. 2Pac did not pick a random pretty piano loop. He picked a song that had already argued that laws move faster than people, and used it as the floor of his own argument.

For British listeners, there is a detail worth knowing. "Changes" performed better in the UK than almost anywhere, reportedly peaking at number three on the singles chart in late 1998 and topping charts in several continental European countries. It became, for a generation of British teenagers, the 2Pac song, the entry point, the one that arrived through daytime radio rather than through a mixtape or an older brother's CD rack. In America he was a tabloid story with a rap sheet. In Britain he arrived, posthumously, as something closer to a protest singer.

Core meaning

Strip away the radio gloss and the song is a diagnosis, delivered in three movements, with almost no consolation offered.

The first movement is personal and exhausted. He opens not with slogans but with fatigue, the sense of being tired of being poor and of being treated as a legitimate target, and the observation that a Black man's death provokes less public grief than it should. He describes a feedback loop rather than a moral failing: a young man with no economic options sells drugs, the drugs destroy his own neighbourhood, the destruction justifies more policing, the policing removes more young men, and the options narrow further. He puts the blame for the supply chain higher up the ladder than the corner, hinting at state complicity in the drug economy, a suspicion widespread in Black American communities long before it reached mainstream reporting.

The second movement turns inward on his own community. This is the part that gets quoted approvingly by people who dislike the rest of his catalogue, and it is more uncomfortable than they realise. He describes the absurdity of Black men killing Black men over territory neither of them owns, and the way the police benefit from that arithmetic. But he is not scolding from outside. He is describing a system he lived in and, in other songs, participated in. The tension is the point: the same artist who recorded this also recorded music that glorified exactly what this song mourns, and he never resolved that contradiction, because it was not resolvable.

The third movement is where the song stops being a complaint and becomes an argument. He proposes that nothing improves until the way people live and treat each other changes, which sounds like a greeting card until you notice what he puts next to it. He recalls the killing of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and asks what has actually changed since, placing his own era inside a lineage of unfinished struggle rather than treating it as a new crisis. He also, in a line that has become one of the most cited in hip-hop, dismisses the idea of America electing a Black president as an obvious fantasy. He meant it as a measure of how immovable the structure was. Ten years later it read as prophecy failing in the most hopeful way possible, and it is now impossible to hear the song without hearing that argument happening between 1992 and the present.

The chorus, sung on the released version by the R&B vocalist Talent and built on the Hornsby piano figure, carries the thesis the sample was already carrying. Some things look permanent. Pretending they are not is a kind of lie; accepting them is a different kind.

Cultural context and legacy

The commercial story is remarkable. Greatest Hits, released in November 1998, went on to sell in the many millions in the United States alone, becoming one of the best-selling rap albums ever made. "Changes" earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Solo Performance at the 2000 ceremony, reportedly losing to Eminem's "My Name Is". The music video was assembled from archival footage, because there was no artist left to film.

Then came the strangest chapter in the song's afterlife. In 2009, "Changes" reportedly appeared on a playlist posted by the Vatican's own online channels alongside classical pieces and other pop records, a juxtaposition that generated a week of global headlines about the Pope endorsing a gangsta rapper. The framing was lazy, but the instinct was not wrong. The song is essentially a lament with a moral demand attached, which is a very old form.

What happened next is the part worth examining. "Changes" became the acceptable 2Pac, and acceptability came at a cost. Because the song is so widely used as his representative work, it flattens him. It allows listeners to admire a social critic while skipping the volatile, contradictory, frequently indefensible artist who recorded hundreds of other tracks: the tenderness of "Dear Mama" and "Keep Ya Head Up", the dread of Me Against the World, the aggression of the Death Row period, the misogyny he was repeatedly and fairly criticised for, the paranoia that turned out to be partly justified. He built a philosophy around the acronym THUG LIFE, which he explained as the idea that hatred directed at children eventually damages everyone, an argument sharp enough that the novelist Angie Thomas later built The Hate U Give on it. "Changes" gives you a sliver of that mind and lets you believe you have met the whole of it.

He also, it should be said, did not write it to be anyone's curriculum. He wrote it at twenty-one, shelved it, and spent the next four years becoming someone far more complicated. The song's canonisation is something done to him, not by him.

Why it still resonates today

The uncomfortable answer is that the diagnosis has aged well, and a song whose predictions keep holding is not a triumph.

Nearly every structural condition the track describes survived into the present in recognisable form. The policing of Black men remained a central political question through the Ferguson protests of 2014 and the global demonstrations of 2020. Incarceration rates built through the 1990s are still being unwound slowly. The economics that make illegal markets attractive in neighbourhoods with no legal ones have not changed shape so much as changed substance. When crowds in London, Bristol and Manchester marched in 2020, they were, whether they knew it or not, marching to a grievance list a Californian twenty-one-year-old had already itemised in 1992.

The musical reason for its durability is simpler. The Hornsby piano figure is one of the most quietly effective loops in pop, patient and slightly melancholy, and it does something no aggressive beat could: it lets the words sit in the open. The 1998 production is warm, almost gentle, which creates a permanent mismatch between how the song sounds and what it says. You can play it in a supermarket. That mismatch is why it travelled, and also why it is so easy to mishear.

And there is the thing that no amount of analysis dissolves. A young man recorded an argument about an unchanging world, filed it away as not good enough, was shot dead four years later at twenty-five, and then had the song released as though he were speaking from somewhere beyond the problem he was describing. Every listener since 1998 has heard it that way. The record is a document of a specific year, a prophecy that was both wrong and right, and an accidental elegy, all at once, and it is the only one of his songs that is all three.

A leftover became the most-played thing he ever made. He would probably have found that funny, and then said something sharp about it.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• "The Way It Is" — Bruce Hornsby and the Range (1986) — hear the source before anything else. It is a US number one built on a piano figure and a thesis about civil rights law failing to change minds, which makes 2Pac's sample choice an act of argument rather than decoration.
• "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" — Marvin Gaye (1971) — the ancestor. Released the year 2Pac was born, it does the same work in soul: taxes, policing, despair, a beautiful arrangement carrying unbearable content.
• "Keep Ya Head Up" and "Dear Mama" — 2Pac — the two songs that show what the "Changes" voice sounds like when he is not shelving the take. Play them next to the hits from the Death Row period and the contradiction at the centre of his catalogue becomes impossible to miss.

📚 Follow the story

• "Tupac Shakur: The Authoritative Biography" — Staci Robinson — written with access to his estate and archives, it corrects decades of myth with the actual paper trail, including the notebooks and shelved recordings.
• "The Rose That Grew from Concrete" — Tupac Shakur — his teenage poetry, published after his death. Rough, earnest, nothing like his public persona, and the clearest evidence of the arts-school kid underneath.
• "Holler If You Hear Me" — Michael Eric Dyson — the standard scholarly reading of why he became a secular saint, and what gets lost in the sanctification. Pair it with Angie Thomas's novel "The Hate U Give" to see his THUG LIFE idea travel into young-adult fiction.

🌍 Visit the places

• Baltimore School for the Arts, Maryland — the building where he studied acting and poetry as a teenager. Standing outside it does more to explain his delivery than any documentary; this is a drama student, not a street mythology.
• Marin City and West Oakland, California — the Bay Area that made him a rapper, from the Marin City housing where his family landed to the Oakland streets where Digital Underground operated. Murals and memorials are informal and keep moving, which feels appropriate.
• Harlem, New York — he was born in East Harlem to a Black Panther mother, and the neighbourhood's civil rights and Panther history is walkable, from Malcolm X landmarks to the Schomburg Center's archives.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• "Tupac: Resurrection" (2003) — the Oscar-nominated documentary narrated entirely by his own recorded interviews, which means for ninety minutes he explains himself without a journalist in between.
• "Dear Mama" (2023) — Allen Hughes's series on Tupac and Afeni, which places the politics of the mother next to the career of the son and reframes almost everything about "Changes".
• Learn the piano loop — the Hornsby figure is within reach of a beginner and teaches more about the song than any analysis. Play it slowly and you will feel why it makes hard words sound bearable.

🎵 Listen to this song