News June 16, 2021
Jada Pinkett Smith Shares Unreleased Tupac Shakur Poem on Would-Be 50th Birthday
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Jada Pinkett Smith honors her late friend Tupac Shakur on what would have been his 50th birthday.
Tuesday on Instagram, the actress shared an unreleased poem from the rapper titled “Lost Soulz” that she believes was written and sent to her while he was incarcerated at Riker’s Island.
“I went down memory lane over the years,” the host explained. “Pac wrote me many letters and many poems and I don’t think this one has ever been published, honestly.”
Noting that the artist had a song with Outlawz called “Lost Souls” on the 1997 “Gang Related” soundtrack, Pinkett Smith believes this poem was the original concept because he wrote it prior to the track.
“And I was like, I don’t think he would have minded that I share this with you guys,” she said before reading the poem, which contains lines including, “I have witnessed all that was pure in me/Be changed by the evil men can do.”
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Pinkett Smith and Shakur met on the first day of high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
However, she walked away from their friendship when she felt his life was getting too dangerous.
Sadly, the two were estranged when Shakur was killed at age 25 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on September 13, 1996.
In a January 2020 interview with Charlamagne tha God, Pinkett Smith’s husband Will Smith admitted to being jealous of the love that Jada had for the late rapper.
“Oh ---- yeah. Oh my God,” Will said. “That was in the early days and it was like, that was a big regret for me, too, because I could never open up to interact with Pac.”
Smith also explained he and Shakur “had a little bit of a thing” over their love for Jada.
“You know, they grew up together and they loved each other [and] they never had a sexual relationship, but they had come into that age where it was a possibility and then Jada was with me,” Will continued.
“Pac had a little thing on that, but she just loved him, like he was the image of perfection, but she was with the Fresh Prince, you know? So, I never could, we were in the room together a couple of times, I couldn’t speak to him, and he wasn’t going to speak to me if I wasn’t going to speak to him.”
However, Will said that Jada believes the two would have had a lot in common.
“That’s what Jada would say all the time: ‘I’m telling you, y’all are so similar, you would love him,’” Will recounted. “And I just never… That was a huge regret of mine, I couldn’t handle it.”
