[ˈtuːpɑːk ʃəˈkʊər]

I clearly remember the first time I heard the devil speak- he was invoked by my 11-year-old cousin Isabel on her MP3 player when I asked her who her favorite musician was. As an innocent Beatles-obsessed teenager raised in a Catholic household, I felt frightened to say the least as I heard him bellow “Hail Mary” and as I looked on at the album cover of the “Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory”*. It depicts Tupac Shakur crucified on a utility pole, shirtless and wearing a bandana backwards that seemed more like a pair of horns than a crown of thorns to me.

However, what was more striking than the blasphemous imagery was that I could not understand a word he was rapping. I could guess the theme of his lyrics but his unique intonation- or better put, phonetic distortion of words- made the task impossible.

According to Kenstowicz, some of the disconnect I had with Tupac’s spoken word was the result of having different systematic rules for spoken language, such as in phonemes. Just like tends can sound like tent, in “Picture Me Rollin” Tupac pronounces want like “wan”, which allows him to rhyme one with want, as they become phonetically identical. There are a great number of examples that show how Tupac uses the “collective phonetic illusions” that Kenstowicz describes to his advantage in his rhymes. Instead of pronouncing smiled with a clear “d” sound at the end, Tupac raps smiled by distorting it to sound like a diphthong by pronouncing it as “smio”. But consonants at the end of words are not the only ones he tends to omit. In words like picture, the “c” is omitted and picture sounds like “pitcher”. In rapping the phrase keep from, he omits “p” from keep and consequently extends the vowel length of e, makes what I infer from Gussenhoven to be a glottal stop, and then proceeds to pronounce the fricative from. In my opinion, it is the aforementioned vowel length that adds to how ominous Hail Mary sounds, because to increase vocal length it sounds like Tupac articulates dorsally, and this causes his pitch to lower.

While I believe most of these patterns in Tupacs speech can be attributed to region, ethnicity, and social class, I think back to Johnson’s belief that people compensate for gender in their speech, and wonder whether this idea can be extended to the other aspects of personality above. I do not think all of his speech patterns were uncontrived. 

*Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory album cover