tupac showed me the way...

Revision for the mocks is officially failing. I am more interested in preparing for my ToK presentation (which is AFTER the mocks) than revising. You can't blame me – I'm meant to be studying 'God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy, and I lie not: its appalling-ness is bringing me to tears. It's not a bad plot at all, but she writes. Like this. Like A Child, Who Doesn't Understand – Punctuation.

Like this.

Yeah. I. Have. Two. Words. In. My. Mind. When. I'm. Reading. It.

“Help”. “Me”.

You know, short sentences, new paragraphs every five seconds, a gazillion words from the thesaurus.. It’s killing me softly.

Let’s get away from the topic of that book.

I don’t know about you guys, but today, instead of revising Maths and shit, I learnt about Tupac. Or 2pac. Gah I’ll just go with Tupac, it looks nicer. Anyway, I’m sure most of you know his story; if not, check out his Wikipedia, it’s quite comprehensive. I'm aware that Wikipedia isn't always trustworthy, so I am gonna research it some more, but the basics are there. Probably. What brought tears to my eyes was reading that his ashes were mixed with marijuana and smoked by Gallowz. It may have been total bullshit, but it moved me all the same.

Why Tupac?

Last summer, my friend and I did the obligatory presentation for the Theory of Knowledge course, but unfortunately it wasn’t focused enough on a real-life situation. So we now have to redo it. In search of a new topic, I’ve been looking through newspapers and noting down anything that’s caught my eye. The recurring theme has been ‘control’, i.e. the lengths to which governments would go, with the justification that they’re trying to run their countries. I also noted down ‘celebrity culture’, in response to the Celebrity Big Brother items.

However, what really focused my choice of topic was… hearing ‘Uprising’ by Muse on the radio. (I told you music inspires me.) This kick-started a long chain of reaction of research. I found myself reading comments on song lyric websites, on the Industry Exposed website, listening back to various songs... let's jus say that some conspiracy theories on various comments I read led me to research Tupac. and this is has shown me the light, for my tok presentation. I won't say any more.

Anyway, there is more to my discovery of Tupac than just ‘it helped me find a ToK presentation topic’. With the arrival of the Cambridge offers, the idea of Oxbridge and university and my future in general has just come back to haunt me and make me panic slightly. This is why reading about Tupac had a profound, even overwhelming, impact on me. The tragedy of his death (and life), and the fact that people aren’t waking up to the messed-up state of our music industry (which his death is blatant proof of) – when I saw both of these, needless to say Oxbridge seemed trivial and worthless. The music industry is so lost in its own shit it kills me.

I hate calling it an ‘industry’, makes it seem so meaningless, manufactured. That’s what it is now though, isn’t it? What’s music about now? The number of records you sell, the number of no.1s you have, the amount of praise you get from Simon Cowell, the number of sold-out gigs you have, how many of your fans want to sleep with you, being able to get your own private jets, the flashingflashingflashing lights you get everywhere you go, how many magazine covers you do, how many TV/billboard adverts you manage to score… Gah I wanna cry.

I won’t though, because I’ve never felt so inspired. My dream of entering the music industry is a recent one, but one which, out of all my career aspirations, I have felt least unconfident about, because I actually feel something for it, I actually care about it. Reading Tupac’s story woke me up, to the fact that Oxbridge isn’t necessary for me to make something of my life or make a difference. The one who makes the biggest difference to my own future is… (surprise surprise) me.

xxxx

p.s. God my posts are depressing now aren't they?! No more 'I got CRUNKKKKK' or 'woohoo let's celebrate cause I'm eighteeeeeeeeen or it's CHRISTMASSSSSS or it's the TENSIES (yeah, someone texted me on NYD, saying 'Happy New Year, welcome to the Tensies!'. How ugly.) Well, they’ll probably lighten up after my mocks. Or maybe they won’t, cause I’ll have done so phenomenally terribly in them that I might get…outlawed, or something. Woop!

p.p.s If you disagree with me about anything here, especially the state of the music industry, you’re welcome to comment and SHOUT AT ME.