In a recent interview, Rashida Jones recalled how she got into a heated argument with Tupac Shakur when she was in her late teens.
Shakur started the exchange by criticizing her father, legendary music producer Quincy Jones, in the pages of a 1993 issue of The Source for having children with white women. In a follow-up issue of the hip-hop magazine, Rashida Jones, then 17, wrote a response to Shakur.
In an interview with The New Yorker published Sunday, she reflected on the exchange with the late rapper.
“So precocious, so self-righteous,” she said. “Yeah, I was so mad. It was a new perspective to me. I kind of understand the nuance more now that I’m older. It just felt like a completely unwarranted attack.”
Rashida Jones recalled being “furious” at the time and thinking that her father should be able to “live his life” how he wants and decide “who he loves” without criticism. Things ultimately took a heartwarming turn when her sister, Kidada Jones, ran into Shakur in public.
“And then my sister was out somewhere in New York, and Tupac came up to apologize to her, because he thought it was me,” Rashida Jones said. “It resolved itself really nicely, because when I met him, he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad. We sat down and had a really good conversation about it, and then he was family.”
The then-22-year-old Shakur had reportedly told The Source about Quincy, “All he does is stick his dick in white bitches and make fucked up kids.” Rashida and Kidada Jones’ mother was the late actor Peggy Lipton, best known for her work on “The Mod Squad” and “Twin Peaks.”
In “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones,” Kidada Jones recounted how she bumped into Shakur in a nightclub, and he apologized to her for his comments.
Raymond Boyd via Getty Images
“I met Tupac at a club after that and he said, ‘I want to apologize to you. I didn’t mean that about your dad or you. I didn’t see you as real human beings. Now that I see you…,’” she said. “He was all game. He was trying to get a play, let’s face it, but I liked him.”
“I didn’t tell my dad about it, because I thought there’d be trouble,” she added.
Kidada Jones and Shakur went on to date and lived together until his death in 1996. The rap icon was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas at 25 years old.
In her father’s book, Kidada Jones described Shakur’s death as “the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.”