How Salt-N-Pepa inspired Tupac Shakur’s ‘Keep Ya Head Up’
On ‘Keep Ya Head Up’, a single from his second album, Strictly 4 My N*GGAZ…, Tupac Shakur touches on the experience of Black women. As he says in the song’s introduction, it’s a track dedicated to his godson Elijah and “a little girl named Corin”.
Corin, it turns out, is the daughter of one of Tupac’s rap contemporaries, the child of Cheryl Renee James, otherwise known as Salt from the pioneering rap group Salt-N-Pepa. Salt had met Pac through Treach from Naughty by Nature, with both men appearing in the music video to the Salt-N-Pepa song ‘Whatta Man’.
As Salt once recalled during an interview with i-D UK, it was during this shoot that she really got to know Tupac. This eventually led her to introduce him to Corin, who was very young at the time. As Salt tells it, Pac seemed to take a real shine to her.
“He had this long conversation with her and, I don’t know, I guess she just struck him somehow,” she reflected, “He called me this one time and said, ‘By the way, I dedicated a song to Corin’”.
Salt claimed that she never quite understood why he’d dedicated the song to her specifically, given that he didn’t know her all too well, but clearly, she left an impression on him and he felt moved to dedicate the track to her, as well as to his own godson.
Pepa, in that same i-D interview, insisted that Pac had “a liking and admiration” for Salt-N-Pepa “as women, as artists”. The two MCs were clearly very fond of Pac and the support he’d lent them when he was alive, and they went on to recount the time that he sent them a cake as a way of congratulating them for a then-recent Grammy win.
It was a nice gesture, but initially, they didn’t necessarily know what to make of it. That’s because the cake was shaped like a handgun, which was certainly sending mixed signals. They’d wondered if they’d annoyed him somehow, but they then realised his true intentions behind the odd gesture.
“We were staring at that cake for so long like… what did we do!” Salt recalled, “Then we realised it was his way of congratulating us on winning our Grammy”.
“Crazy,” concluded Pepa, “That was Pac”.