Rashida Jones is giving more insight into what went down between her family and late rapper Tupac Shakur in the 1990s.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Jones, 48, said she was "furious" about comments Shakur made in The Source magazine, where he reportedly criticized her father, Quincy Jones, for having children with white women.
“So precocious, so self-righteous. Yeah, I was so mad. It was a new perspective to me,” Rashida Jones said, adding that she can grasp the “nuance more now that I’m older.”
“It just felt like a completely unwarranted attack,” she continued. “My dad doesn’t work for the government. He’s a music producer. How he chooses to live his life and who he loves is just his own business, and I’ve always felt that way.”
After noting she wrote to The Source to respond to Tupac's comments about her family, Jones told the outlet that Shakur ultimately apologized for his remarks about her father, adding that they had a "really good conversation."
“My sister was out somewhere in New York, and Tupac came up to apologize to her, because he thought it was me,” Rashida Jones said of her sister, Kidada Jones. “It resolved itself really nicely, because when I met him, he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad. We sat down and had a really good conversation about it, and then he was family.”
The “Parks and Recreation” actor, who's the daughter of Quincy Jones and the late Peggy Lipton, said she felt the entire interaction really spoke to Shakur’s character.
“You can say whatever you’re going to say, and you can mean it. And then, when you meet people, that can change,” she continued. “That was an early lesson for me, because I have been self-righteous in my life, and I really have worked hard to stop looking at things in a binary way. We’re so flawed and so complicated.”
While appearing as a guest on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna July 10, the actor said growing up with the legendary producer as a father really inspired her love of music.
“Well, I didn’t know anything else but I did have a deep appreciation for what we were exposed to,” she said. “Just the best music, the best artists, just the coolest family vibe.”
She continued, “I do feel like my sense of music and how meaningful it is to my life really started then, deeply embedded.”
