Angie Martinez sat on Tupac’s angriest interview for 30 years. Netflix will play it on 27 November

Thirty years after she cut it with a razor blade in a New York editing room, Angie Martinez is letting the world hear the rest of her Tupac Shakur interview.

Netflix released the trailer for The Tupac Tapes with Angie Martinez on Wednesday, US time, and set the premiere for Friday 27 November. The four-part video podcast is built around a conversation Martinez recorded at Tupac’s Los Angeles home in 1996, about three months before he was shot in Las Vegas and died at 25.

At the time Martinez was a 25-year-old host at New York’s Hot 97, and it was her first major interview. It landed in the middle of the most dangerous rivalry in rap history, with Tupac and Death Row on one coast and the Notorious B.I.G. and Bad Boy on the other.

Why was it kept off the air?

Martinez aired the parts in which Tupac said he was not at war with the whole East Coast. The more inflammatory sections she kept to herself, and after his death she kept them there.

“There were things said in that conversation that could have hurt people,” she said in Netflix’s own interview about the series. In the trailer she puts it more starkly: she did not want anybody to die because of a conversation.

She has described the decision to release it now as a matter of context: the tapes should not sit in her possession forever, and the series lets her share them with the people around the story.

What does Tupac say?

The trailer gives a taste. Tupac talks about betrayal, paranoia and the fallout from his 1994 shooting in a New York studio and his time in prison. In one clip he is heard asking, “Where’s the f***ing love? Just ’cause they didn’t kill me?”

Martinez says she hopes viewers come away seeing “a brilliant, flawed, deeply human young man”, rather than a saint or a villain.

How did the interview happen?

By Martinez’s account, Tupac first asked her to appear in the video for I Ain’t Mad at Cha. She said no to the video but accepted an invitation to his home, where, she has said, he had New York pizza waiting for her.

Who is in the series?

Each of the four episodes plays part of the tape, with guests reacting. Netflix’s line-up includes RZA, Charlamagne Tha God, Joe Budden, Big Boy, Wallo, Bootleg Kev, DJ Hed, Ed Lover, Monie Love and the writer and filmmaker dream hampton, along with people from Tupac’s and Biggie’s own worlds: Lil’ Cease, who was part of B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A., and E.D.I. Mean of the Outlawz, Tupac’s group. Former NBA player Matt Barnes and community activist Erica Ford also appear.

Why does this matter beyond the fans?

Tupac’s final year has been dissected for three decades, mostly through other people’s memories, court files and the music he left behind. A long, unedited conversation recorded in the moment, with the feud still live, is a different kind of record. It shows what he was saying privately to a journalist from the coast he was supposedly at war with, and what that journalist judged too dangerous to broadcast.

It also arrives as the people who lived through the feud have become the elders of hip-hop, and several of them are the ones reacting on screen.

When can Australians watch?

The series premieres globally on Netflix on 27 November, so it lands for Australian subscribers on the same date.