A never-before-heard Tupac recording is up for auction

A tape thought to contain Tupac’s “earliest” surviving music recording is going up for auction via Wax Poetics.

Thought to be recorded between 1987 and 1988, the unreleased tape comes from the personal archive of Tupac’s childhood friend and DJ Ge-ology, and has never been released to the public.

The auction comes as part of the ‘Tupac Grails & Hip Hop History’ collection, and includes memorabilia from Ge-ology’s personal archive such as handwritten lyrics, photographs of Tupac DJing at a party, and a signed graduation banner.

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The rare recording, which was previously referenced in Tupac’s biography Only God Can Judge Me, is described as an “extraordinary and irreplaceable” piece of memorabilia, and documents Tupac at the age of just 16 then working under the alias MC New York.

The seven-track cassette tape includes recordings from Tupac’s first-ever group, Born Busy, made in Baltimore in the late ‘80s – captured before the late rapper ever rose to fame.

“This wasn’t meant to be a performance or a release. We were recording acapellas so I could learn the rhymes and build the beats around them,” Ge-ology says.

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“That tape is one of the earliest moments of Tupac being documented, before the world knew who he was. I’ve protected it for decades, and now it feels right for it to be shared properly, as history.”

Elsewhere in the collection, a framed lyric sheet “offering a rare and intimate insight into Tupac Shakur’s creative process during his Baltimore years” is also up for sale, taken from the same period of the recording.

The collection went live on January 15 and will remain open for just under a month until February 11. Check out the auction here.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on X