It’s a question Yo-Yo has fielded more times than she can count, and by her own admission, she’s not always thrilled to answer it.
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“He’s probably looking down, saying you still got his name in your mouth,” she joked when Baller Alert brought up her decades-long, sibling-like bond with Tupac Shakur. But even with the eye-roll, Yo-Yo didn’t shy away from the conversation, because this time, the question wasn’t about the past. It was about what could have been.Yo-Yo came up alongside Tupac as more than a collaborator; she describes their relationship as almost brother and sister. So instead of asking her to relive old memories, Baller Alert posed something rarer: looking at where her own career has gone, and where peers like Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg have taken theirs, far beyond music and into business empires, what would Tupac’s career, and the industry itself, look like today if he were still here?
“That’s a great question,” Yo-Yo said, taking a moment to really sit with it. Her first answer came without hesitation.
“I definitely think he would have his two cents in everything. That’s number one.” From there, she painted a picture of an artist who never stayed in one lane for long. “I think Pac would really be, I mean, he would be taking… he had so much depth. I think he’d be right up there with all of the greats. I think he’d be doing the same big arenas that Jay-Z is doing.”
But for Yo-Yo, the bigger story isn’t the size of the stage; it’s what he would have built off of it.
“Hopefully he would have moved out of certain deals and really wanted to elevate his business,” she said. “A man who was so powerful, so young, but so wise.”
Yo-Yo didn’t just speak to Tupac’s talent; she spoke to how singular his perspective was at a time when so much around them was falling apart.
“He came in this game with a different mindset than I had ever seen,” she said. A young girl from California, where gang-infested neighborhoods were taken over, and gangs and drugs were taking over our community at that time, and here you had this conscious brother who just became more and more invested, invested, invested, until he just became Machiavelli, Makaveli, Tupac, you know what I mean, all these different people.
That evolution, she suggested, wouldn’t have stopped in 1996. In her eyes, it would have kept building into something even bigger. Rather than guessing at a specific business venture or brand, Yo-Yo’s answer landed somewhere more personal. She believes Tupac would have finally reached a place of peace, free from needing to prove anything to anyone.
“I definitely think that he would have found his peace, and didn’t have to really prove himself,” she said. “I think right now he would be who he wants to be in this industry, and great at it.”
It’s a rare glimpse into how someone who actually knew Tupac imagines his path forward, not frozen in time as the icon we lost, but evolving right alongside the friends who are still building their legacies today.
