Tupac "Changes" commentary

Tupac, who was killed in 1996, was an American Rapper. Many of his songs feature the struggles that many people from black ethnicity have to cope with. The rap song "changes" carries with it Tupac's own lived experiences. The lyrics sheds light on significant issues consisting of violence, poverty and racism, all beholding a strong message of peace and equality.

In the third line of the song, "Is life worth living? Should i blast myself?", we can view it as a rising action, where Tupac is introducing an internal conflict to us as audience, which is a conflict of a struggle occurring within a character's mind. Then Tupac moves on to say in the next few lines, "I'm tired of bein' poor and even worse I'm black, my stomach hurts, so I'm lookin' for a purse to snatch", these lines further illustrate the internal conflict the author Tupac is struggling with, we are given an insight of how many people from black ethnicity live in poverty in America, and are not given the same opportunities and living standards, so they divert into doing wrong in order to move on. Tupac keeps on repeating and stating that he "sees no changes", further demonstrating his eagerness to see people from his culture and from black ethnicity, to be recognized by society and be equal.

Various Poetic features were in play and enhanced the message delivered to the audience, such as an anaphora, rhyme, allusion, free verse, Irony and metaphor.

Anaphora is a word or phrase that is repeated at the start of lines, "I see no changes, wake up in the morning and I ask myself ... I see no changes, all I see is racist faces", these previous lines carry an anaphora within to be delivered to the audience. A rhyme is an important component that can be very common in songs, which is considered to be the usage of matching sound patterns of different words at the end of different sentences, evident in the lines "Don't let 'em jack you up, back you up, Crack you up and pimp-smack you up". An allusion was also present, which is when the song writer or author refers to another text, person or an event, for example "It's time to fight back, that's what Huey said. Two shots in the dark, now Huey's dead".

Ironies were also present in the song, which are words that convey a meaning different and opposite of their literal meaning, such poetic devices are used by authors who are discussing an issue where they are resembling a minority or a lost cause, this can be shown in the lines "Give the crack to the kids, who the hell cares? One less hungry mouth on the welfare", in these previous lines, Tupac asks to hand drugs down to kids, however the intention is to show how desperate people can get for fighting a case that is being looked down upon. Last but not least, free verse, a piece of text written in free verse is intended to not have any rhymes or a basic regular rhythm, this was clear in the lines "We gotta make a change. It's time for us as a people to start making some changes. Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live And let's change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do what we gotta do to survive".