Angie Martinez Is Finally Opening the Vault: ‘The Tupac Tapes’ Brings Her Unheard 1996 Interview to Netflix
Some tapes are legend before anyone hears them. Netflix announced today that The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez — a four-part video podcast event built around the never-before-released portions of Angie Martinez’s 1996 interview with Tupac Shakur — premieres November 27, with a first trailer out now.
The backstory is the stuff of hip hop folklore. As Martinez tells it to Netflix, it started with a phone call: Tupac had asked her to appear in his “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” video. She declined — the coastal tensions were too hot — and the call turned into an invitation to his Los Angeles home, where he had New York pizza waiting and wanted to make clear his issues were never with New York as a whole. The rising Hot 97 voice sat down with him for a conversation that ran, by her estimate, about an hour and forty minutes. It was recorded roughly three months before he was killed, at the boiling point of the East Coast–West Coast war — and only pieces of it ever aired.
Martinez has never hidden why. Back in New York, she sat in the editing room physically cutting the tape with a razor blade, trying to figure out what she could responsibly put on the air. Things were said in that conversation that, in her words, “could have hurt people, damaged relationships, and added fuel to an already dangerous situation.” “I didn’t want anybody to die because of a conversation that I went to LA to go get,” she says in the trailer. After Pac died, it got heavier still — she felt a responsibility to protect something that was never meant to become his final statement. What changed, she says, is simple: “These tapes were bigger than me. They’re a piece of hip-hop history.” For close to thirty years, through a Radio Hall of Fame career, the unheard Tupac interview sat in her vault as one of the culture’s great what-ifs.
The series is not a straight playback. Across four episodes, Martinez revisits the tapes with a roundtable of people who lived that era from the inside: RZA, E.D.I. Mean of the Outlawz, Lil’ Cease, Monie Love, Ed Lover and Dream Hampton, alongside Charlamagne Tha God, Joe Budden, Big Boy, Wallo, Matt Barnes, Bootleg Kev, DJ Hed, Erica Ford and Aiyisha T. Obafemi — breaking down Pac’s mindset, the pressure he was under, and what the conversation means now.
The trailer teases just enough of his voice to raise the hair on your arms: Tupac talking betrayal, loyalty and consequences — “Everything you do, you have to suffer and pay the consequences,” and, raw with hurt, “Where’s the f***ing love? Just ’cause they didn’t kill me?!” In the studio, Joe Budden asks the question the whole culture has asked for three decades: “You’ve been sitting on this for 30 years?” It plays less like a podcast promo and more like a history document finally being unsealed — a 25-year-old superstar who sounds like a man who knew the walls were closing in.
On November 27, the vault opens. Whatever side of the coast you rep, this is required viewing: Tupac Shakur, in his own words, in his final months, heard in full for the first time. The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez streams exclusively on Netflix.