Ethel Love, the star teen in Tupac’s Brenda’s Got A Baby, broke her silence more than 30 years later on Good Morning America.
Celebrating 50 years of hip hop, Good Morning America recently aired a segment covering Tupac’s impact on the genre. Highlighting one of Tupac’s most popular music videos, GMA went with the Hughes Brothers directed video, Brenda’s Got A Baby.
The video shot and released in 1992, Brenda’s Got A Baby was Tupac’s second single off his 1991 debut album 2Pacalypse Now. Never before has hip hop witnessed such a story told by an artist’s lyrics cohesively from start to finish. A gut-wrenching story, as described by Good Morning America.
For Tupac, it was not difficult to reach into his lyrical pocket to create such a story. The rapper had all the substance needed after he became aware of the true life story when reading a local New York newspaper. What was difficult for Tupac, was the little attention the story was receiving.
Tupac, who was disturbed and heartbroken over the story, had to express himself the best way he knew how. “By lunch time, he was like, ‘YO, come in the trailer.’ He started spitting this rhyme for me,” Omar Epps, Tupac’s Juice co-star, explained during a 2022 interview. “He’s spitting it and I’m not catching it though. I’m listening to it, but I’m not catching it. Six months later his album comes out and I hear ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’ and my mind was blown.”
The song lives forever in hip hop history, along with other Tupac classics such as Dear Mama and Keep Ya Head Up. Now more than 31 years later, Ethel Love who portrayed Brenda in the music video has broken her silence.
“When you see that video, by somebody looking at it today, you understand that, ‘man I experienced that. Oh, my niece just experienced that,” said Ethel on GMA. The now 49-year-old mother of three, also revealed how she landed the part in the iconic music video.
“Tupac was a friend of mine and my brothers so it was easy cause we all hung around each other. Talked with each other,” she said. Only Seventeen at the time, Ethel had no idea how big of a star Tupac would become or the impact the music video would have till this day. “We didn’t know Tupac was going to explode so big like that. We didn’t even know that video was gonna explode.”
