Angie Martinez Sat on Tupac's Last Interview for 30 Years. Netflix Is Playing It.

The voice hits before the picture settles. Reel-to-reel tape turning, and Tupac Shakur, three months from the night in Las Vegas that killed him, saying it flat: "I've done more for credibility in hip-hop than any f***ing artist." Netflix released the trailer Wednesday for The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez, a four-part video podcast built on an interview the world has heard twelve minutes of. The rest sat in Angie Martinez's possession for nearly thirty years. It premieres November 27.

Martinez was 25, an on-air personality at New York's Hot 97, when Tupac called. He had first asked her to appear in his "I Ain't Mad at Cha" video. She declined — the coastal war made a New York radio face in a Death Row video a loaded image — and the conversation turned into an invitation instead. He flew her into his world: an interview at his Los Angeles home, New York pizza waiting, because he wanted it understood that his problems were never with all of New York. The sit-down ran about an hour and forty minutes. It was her first major interview. It was also, though nobody framed it that way then, one of the last long conversations he ever gave.

Watch: the official trailer

The Razor Blade

Back in New York, Martinez did something that sounds like a scene from a movie because it is one now: she physically cut the tape with a razor blade, working through the reels and deciding, splice by splice, what she could responsibly put on the air. About twelve minutes aired on Hot 97. The rest never did. In the trailer she says why in one sentence: "I didn't want anybody to die because of a conversation that I went to L.A. to go get."

That fear was not theatrical. The interview sits at the peak of the East Coast–West Coast feud, with Tupac's war against Bad Boy and the Notorious B.I.G. running hot, and the tapes catch him unguarded — "They cross me. Now they cross me… this is like war games right now." Names got named. Lines got drawn. Then, weeks after the interview aired its twelve minutes, Tupac was dead at 25, and Martinez was the voice on Hot 97 who had to break the news to her listeners. The tapes stopped being an interview and became, in her words to Netflix's Tudum, something she felt "a responsibility to protect" — never meant to become his final statement.

So the reels lived the way heavy things live: in storage, in a laundry room at one point, digitized only after Jay-Z pushed her to secure them. She has flatly denied the rumor, repeated for years, that Sean "Diddy" Combs paid her to bury the tape. Nobody paid her. She was carrying it.

The Room Where It Plays

The format Netflix is releasing is not a documentary narrated over the tapes. Martinez hosts. She plays the reels in a present-day studio for a rotating room of guests hearing them react in real time — Joe Budden, Charlamagne Tha God, RZA, Lil' Cease, Monie Love, Ed Lover, Big Boy, DJ Hed, dream hampton and E.D.I. Mean among them, with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson also executive producers through All the Smoke Productions alongside IRL Productions. At one point in the trailer Budden turns to her and asks the question the whole series is built on: "You've been sitting on this for 30 years?"

Her answer, given to Tudum, is about context. Almost thirty years have passed. Some of the people Tupac spoke harshly about are gone. The tapes, she decided, are bigger than her — a piece of hip-hop history that should not sit in one person's possession forever — and now she can share them framed the way they were always going to need to be framed. What she wants a viewer to meet is Tupac "not as a saint, not as a villain, but as a brilliant, flawed, deeply human young man."

Why Now Lands Differently

The timing carries its own weight. The trailer arrives weeks after Duane "Keffe D" Davis was sentenced to 40 years to life for orchestrating Tupac's murder — a case that hung over this story for three decades finally closed in a courtroom. What was left unheard was the man's own voice, in a living room, at the exact moment the feud was swallowing everything around him. On November 27, four episodes put that voice back in the room, with the woman who decided in 1996 that the world could only hear twelve minutes of it sitting right there, pressing play.