Here's The Rare Tupac Interview Kendrick Lamar Used On His New Album

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If the first big surprise about Kendrick Lamar’s new album was its early release, the second was surely an unexpected appearance from Tupac at the end of the record.

Splicing up a rare old interview the West Coast legend conducted with Swedish radio P3, K. Dot’s To Pimp A Butterfly finds the younger Cali icon carrying out an imagined conversation with Pac. The back-and-forth takes place over the album’s final track, “Mortal Man,” and features Kendrick asking Tupac about life and how to approach his music.

While “Mortal Man” is just about perfect itself, here’s a collection of some of the best quotes from that Tupac interview conducted in 1994, just weeks before he was murdered. Some of the highlights below were featured on the song but many were left untouched.

Listen to “Mortal Man” below while you read through some of Pac’s wisdom.

“I like to think that in every opportunity I’ve ever been threatened with resistance it’s been met with resistance. Not only me, it goes down my family tree. It’s in my veins to fight back.”

“You put any dog or person in the corner, that’s when you get the craziest fights. That’s when you get that strongest left jab. That hook. That super-cross. All that shit. Knockout! Knockout!”

“I see myself as a natural born hustler, a true hustler, in every sense of the word. I took nothin’, I took the opportunities, I worked at the most menial and degrading job and built myself up so I could get it to where I owned it. I went from having somebody manage me to me hiring the person that works my management company. I changed everything. I realized my destiny in a matter of five years, you know what I’m saying. I made myself a millionaire.”

“I don’t understand, Bill Clinton could pull his d*ck out and don’t nobody say shit. Tupac pull my d*ck out and everybody wanna put me in jail. I don’t understand. It’s not the same rules. We all have to follow the same rules. The rules have to apply to every man, woman, and child. It cannot be just for the rich or the poor. If it is then there’s gonna be war. And that’s what thug life is about.”

“As far as my style, it comes out my heart. I don’t try to be bravado, I don’t try to be brave and be strong. I just try to be me.”

“If they could put a little thing on my head so you could see what I see when I close my eyes it’d make you crazy.”

“In this country, a Black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength, and that’s right now while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. ‘Cause once you turn 30, it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a Black man, in this country. And you don’t wanna fight no more. And if you don’t believe me you can look around, you don’t see no loud mouth 30-year-old motherf*kers.”

“Scarface said it best: ‘America is always blaming us for their f*ck ups.’ That’s true. Right now the country is a piece of sh*t. Right now our country is a piece of sh*t. It’s not that we gotta be a piece of sh*t it’s just that this is how they want us to be. They want us to be a piece sh*t so that the poor people kill the poor people, the rich people get paid off of selling the poor people dreams of getting rich.”

“The evil thoughts, the murderous intentions that’s in my semen that I’ma pass on to my child will shake the walls of every building in this country and in every country that follows. Do you feel me? The shit that I’m saying is nothing compared to what my offspring is gonna feel. Trust me.”