Eighteen years after Pac’s death and he’s still hip hop’s greatest ever. I watched a documentary about his life “Thug Angel” and was amazed by the depth of his artistry and what he read. He incorporated all he read into his lyrics which are explosive, ingenious, prophetic, compelling. Some of his lyrics are considered extremist poetry and studied in some universities like the University of Pennsylvania. Here are some books the hip hop genius read.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (it’s from this Italian statesman that he derived his nickname, Makavelli)
Ponder on this, from the writings of Alice A Bailey and the Tibetan master Djwal Khul,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead by WY Evans Wentz,
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Mastering the Art of War by Zhuge Liang
Thought and Meditation by Khalil Gibran
Our State of Consciousness
Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem
Roots by Alex Haley
The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Occult Teachings
The Ancient Mysteries
The Impact of Colour
The Buddha
Astrology
Alignment
Challenge
The moon. He read books by William Shakespeare, Donald Goines, Sun Tzu, Kurt Vonnegut, Mikhail Bakunin, J. D. Salinger, Hermann Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Henry Miller, Homer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Fox Butterfield, Robert M. Pirsig, Robin Morgan, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, E. D. Hirsch, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill, Bhagavad Gita, W. L. Wilmshurst, John Steinbeck, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Richard Wright, Jamaica Kincaid, W. E. B. Du Bois, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker
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