Angie Martinez Is Finally Releasing Her Unheard 1996 Tupac Interview

Angie Martinez is finally releasing her unheard 1996 Tupac interview in Netflix’s The Tupac Tapes, premiering Nov. 27.
The Tupac Tapes Podcast-Series

For almost 30 years, one of the most talked-about conversations in hip-hop history has sat in Angie Martinez’s possession. Now the world will hear it.

Netflix will premiere The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez on November 27. The four-part video podcast event centers on the interview Martinez recorded with Tupac Shakur in 1996, just months before he was shot in Las Vegas and died at 25.

Over the years, Martinez has hinted at the parts of that conversation listeners never heard. The series will finally air the full recording, along with the context she says it needs.

At the time, Martinez was a young radio personality in New York, and the East Coast–West Coast tension in hip-hop was at its peak. The conversation started when Tupac reached out about her appearing in his I Ain’t Mad at Cha video. Martinez wasn’t comfortable with the idea, but after they talked, Tupac made it clear his issues weren’t with all of New York. He invited her to his home in Los Angeles to sit down for an interview, and he had New York pizza waiting when she arrived.

What he said in that room was another story. Martinez aired the portions that carried his message that he wasn’t at war with an entire coast. She held back the more inflammatory moments, which she believed could hurt people and make a dangerous situation worse.

She has recalled cutting the tape by hand with a razor blade in the editing room, deciding what was responsible to put on air. Months later, she was on the radio the day Tupac died and had to break the news to listeners.

“I felt a responsibility to protect something that was never meant to become his final statement,” Martinez told Netflix’s Tudum.

Martinez is candid in the trailer about the weight she carried as a young woman in the industry holding that kind of material. “I was a young woman on the radio trying to live out her dream,” she says. “I didn’t want anybody to die because of a conversation that I went to L.A. to go get.”

The series brings in some of hip-hop’s most recognizable voices to unpack the tapes and the climate around them, including Charlamagne Tha God, Joe Budden, Big Boy, Dream Hampton, RZA and Wallo. Their reactions in the trailer range from disbelief to reflection on the pain Tupac was carrying.

The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez premieres November 27 on Netflix.