Angie Martinez is finally opening the vault. Nearly three decades after she recorded a conversation with Tupac Shakur in Los Angeles, the veteran broadcaster is releasing the full, almost three-hour interview as a four-part video podcast with Netflix, premiering November 27.
The tapes have long been a source of fascination among hip hop fans. Martinez previously shared only a small portion of the recording, roughly 12 to 13 minutes, while keeping the rest out of public view.
At the time, she judged the material too volatile to air amid the tensions surrounding Tupac in the 1990s.
A trailer released by Netflix offers a glimpse of the intensity she held back. “They crossed me,” Tupac said in one clip. “This is like war games right now.”
In another, he spoke of the violence and legal troubles that defined his final years. “They shot me, took me to jail,” he said. “My family has never been protected,” he added.
Martinez also addresses her own reasoning in the trailer, recalling the weight of what she carried as a young broadcaster. “I was a young woman on the radio trying to like live out her dream,” she said.
Asked about holding the recording for so long, her answer was direct. “I didn’t want anybody to die because of a conversation that I went to LA to go get,” she said.
Her explanation for releasing it now centres on timing and instinct. Martinez said she pays close attention to what is happening in the world and how it feels on her spirit, and that the signs eventually pointed in one direction. “It felt like time,” she said.
She tied the decision partly to recent legal developments in the long-running case surrounding Tupac’s death, describing the moment as “a closing of a chapter” for the rapper.
“I was already in production for this before the trial and everything, but when the trial happened I just felt like there was closure there,” she explained.
Martinez added that the passage of time has changed how the conversation can be received. “I just feel like it’s a piece of history at this point,” she said, adding that audiences today “could listen to some hard conversations and some things that are difficult to hear.”
Rather than simply airing the tape, Martinez built the series around reflection and context. “I gathered a group of folks whose voices I respected and we made a four-part podcast,” she said.
Contributors include Big Boy, Bootleg Kev, DJ Head, Joe Budden, Erica Ford and Dream Hampton, with Martinez hosting. Lil Cease, a close associate of The Notorious B.I.G., also appears in the trailer.
According to Martinez, listeners may be surprised by how much emotion sits beneath Tupac’s words.
She has suggested that while the rapper is often remembered as fearless and confrontational, the interview also reveals a man who was hurt, frustrated and feeling betrayed, trying to make sense of everything happening around him.
The series will also trace her own story as a young radio personality coming up in the industry during that era.
Those who have heard the full recording describe it as unlike anything in Tupac’s catalogue, including his most aggressive diss records.
Commentators have pointed to the trauma he carried at just 25 years old, and to the restraint Martinez showed by not rushing a explosive interview to air at the height of a bitter coast rivalry.
The project has also come with its share of eerie moments. Martinez has said that small signs have followed her throughout production, including a Tupac song that played just before she went on air one morning, one her DJ had not queued. In the trailer, the lights go out mid-conversation, a moment those involved say really happened.
The release arrives 30 years after Tupac’s death. All four parts debut November 27.
