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What was Tupac Shakur’s family like?

What did tupac shakur’s music concern, who killed tupac shakur.

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Tupac Shakur

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Tupac Shakur’s mother and stepfather, Afeni and Mutulu Shakur, were both members of the Black Panther Party . Afeni had been in jail in New York City on bombing charges before she gave birth to her son. Mutulu was a party leader and was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list until the 1980s.

How did Tupac Shakur start rapping?

In his teenage years, Tupac Shakur attended the Baltimore School for the Arts in Baltimore, Maryland. During that time one of his friends was shot while playing with a gun. This accident inspired Shakur to write and perform his first rap, which was about gun control.

Tupac Shakur’s music often glorified the violent, misogynistic, drug-filled “thug life” led by many 1990s gangsta rappers . However, several of Shakur’s songs signaled the bleak and racist reality of the ghetto that forced black youth down that path. He also wrote songs that uplifted women and emphasized the importance of fatherhood.

Tupac Shakur died on September 13, 1996, six days after a gunman in a white Cadillac shot him four times in the chest at a stoplight in Las Vegas. A 2002 Los Angeles Times investigation determined that uncooperative witnesses and minimal pursuit of gang-related leads resulted in an unresolved homicide case. In 2023 a witness to the shooting, Duane Davis, was arrested and charged with murder. Learn more.

Is Tupac Shakur actually dead?

Tupac Shakur’s family, the Las Vegas Police Department, and a formal autopsy report all corroborate the legitimacy of Shakur’s death. Nevertheless, conspiracy theories persist among fans and the media about his murder, two of the most popular being that he faked his death and escaped to Cuba or Malaysia.

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Tupac Shakur (born June 16, 1971, Brooklyn, New York , U.S.—died September 13, 1996, Las Vegas, Nevada) was an American rapper and actor who was one of the leading names in 1990s gangsta rap .

Lesane Crooks was born to Afeni Shakur (née Alice Faye Williams), a member of the Black Panther Party , and she renamed him Tupac Amaru Shakur—after Peruvian revolutionary Túpac Amaru II —when he was a year old. He spent much of his childhood on the move with his family, which in 1986 settled in Baltimore , Maryland , where Shakur attended the elite Baltimore School for the Arts. He distinguished himself as a student, both creatively and academically, but his family relocated to Marin City, California, before he could graduate. There Shakur took to the streets, selling drugs and becoming involved in the gang culture that would one day provide material for his rap lyrics. In 1990 he joined Digital Underground, an Oakland-based rap group that had scored a Billboard Top 40 hit with the novelty single “The Humpty Dance.” Shakur performed on two Digital Underground albums in 1991, This Is an EP Release and Sons of the P , before his solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now , later that year.

2Pacalypse Now was a radical break from the dance party sound of Digital Underground, and its tone and content were much closer to the works of Public Enemy and West Coast gangsta rappers N.W.A . The lack of a clear single on the album limited its radio appeal, but it sold well, especially after U.S. Vice Pres. Dan Quayle criticized the song “Soulja’s Story” during the 1992 presidential campaign. That same year Shakur joined the ranks of other rappers-turned-actors, such as Ice Cube and Ice-T, when he was cast in the motion picture Juice , an urban crime drama . The following year he appeared in Poetic Justice , opposite Janet Jackson , and he released his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. The album did not stray far from the activist lyricism of his debut, but singles such as “Holler If Ya Hear Me” and “Keep Ya Head Up” made it much more radio-friendly.

With increased fame and success came greater scrutiny of Shakur’s gangsta lifestyle. A string of arrests culminated with a conviction for sexual assault in 1994; he was incarcerated when his third album, Me Against the World , was released in 1995. Shakur was paroled after serving eight months in prison, and he signed with Suge Knight’s Death Row Records for his next release. That album, All Eyez on Me (1996), was a two-disc paean to the “thug life” that Shakur embodied. It debuted at number one on the Billboard charts and sold more than five million copies within its first year of release. Quick to capitalize on his most recent success, Shakur returned to Hollywood, where he starred in Bullet (1996) and Gridlock’d (1997).

On the evening of September 7, 1996, Shakur was leaving a Las Vegas casino , where he had just attended a prizefight featuring heavyweight champion Mike Tyson , when he was shot by an unknown assailant. The incident, believed by many to be the result of an ongoing rivalry between the East Coast and West Coast rap communities , shocked the entertainment world. Shakur died six days later. Decades would pass without significant developments in the investigation of Shakur’s murder , and two of the parties of interest— Crips street gang member Orlando Anderson and East Coast rapper The Notorious B.I.G. —were themselves shot and killed. In September 2023 Anderson’s uncle Duane Davis was arrested and charged as the ringleader of the group that carried out the shooting.

In spite of his relatively short recording career, Shakur left an enduring legacy within the hip-hop community . His popularity was undiminished after his death, and a long succession of posthumous releases (many of them were simply repackaged or remixed existing material, and most were of middling quality) ensured that “new” 2Pac albums continued to appear well into the 21st century. Shakur was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

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Tupac Shakur's Legacy, 20 Years On

"I think he knew from the very beginning, 'I have a very short window to live. I've got to create a body of work,'" writer Kevin Powell says of Tupac Shakur. Mark Peterson/Corbis via Getty Images hide caption

"I think he knew from the very beginning, 'I have a very short window to live. I've got to create a body of work,'" writer Kevin Powell says of Tupac Shakur.

On Sept. 13, 1996, Tupac Shakur died, six days after he was targeted in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Twenty years later, Tupac has become a celebrated figure around the world. He's not only a lodestar of hip-hop, but a global cultural phenomenon. Recent attempts have even been made to resurrect him: He performed in CGI form with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in 2012 and conversed, through some studio wizardry, with Kendrick Lamar on the last track of To Pimp A Butterfly .

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Code switch: why do we still care about tupac.

Writer Kevin Powell says Tupac is more than a rapper. "When we think about Tupac Shakur ... not just in hip-hop but popular culture, in America and globally, you have to think about Elvis Presley , James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon , Bob Marley ," Powell says. "It's that significant. He is one of the most important figures that we've seen in the last 25 years or so."

Powell interviewed Tupac a number of times for Vibe magazine, including while the rapper was serving time in jail for a sexual abuse conviction. He joined NPR's Renee Montagne to discuss Tupac's lasting legacy, as well as the complexities he embodied. Hear their conversation at the audio link above, and read on for highlights.

Interview Highlights

On what distinguished Tupac's music

You're talking about an artist who came from the people and decided that his work was going to reflect the conditions that were going on in America during his lifetime — his short 25 years on this planet. He talks about violence, he talks about drugs, he talks about his mother's drug addiction, he talks about poverty. He talks about his own contradictions. You get vulnerability, you get an exploration of manhood from different angles, even admitting all of his many mistakes ... And so those things, that kind of honesty — which is so rare for a lot of people — made him someone who became a touchstone for folks' lives. And that's why they responded to him, and still do.

"Keep Ya Head Up" [is] a song that is really an ode to women. It's a pro-feminist song; he talks about being pro-choice in this song, he talks about being anti-street-harassment in this song. But he also — it's an autobiographical song about being a young black male growing up in inner-city America. And that was Pac's uniqueness: his ability to weave in different scenarios and to paint this full picture of a community, over and over again.

On Afeni Shakur's role in her son's life and music

She raised Tupac as a single mother. She was in prison for her political activities in 1971, and just a month before Tupac was born, she was finally released. And he was literally born in the midst of all the upheaval in our country at that time. He was born a month after Marvin Gaye released What's Going On , and in a lot of ways that album is a soundtrack for who Tupac and Afeni were as mother and son. And she's such an important figure — she helped shape his political consciousness, but also there's the dynamic of their separation and moving about, because she became addicted to crack cocaine ... And so he was out there trying to find his way as a young man without a father figure, and it was difficult, and he talks about that in this music.

On the contradictions represented by the violence in some of Tupac's lyrics

In a lot of ways Pac was no different than what we heard in the blues, jazz music [and] rock 'n' roll that came before, because all those music forms also talked about violence, were disrespectful toward women. ... And so Pac was actually very much in that tradition, unfortunately, of us who are men in this society, who have been socialized through patriarchy, through misogyny, through sexism. And he grappled with that, because, again, you can hear, in "Keep Ya Head Up," him talking about being in support of women — but then you turn to a song like " Hit 'Em Up ," and he's talking about being violent toward his rivals and having sex with one of his rivals' wives. It was very disrespectful, but it represented the contradictions that many of us as men face in this society.

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Reflections on tupac from afeni shakur.

What was different about Tupac is that he spoke very openly and honestly about it — not just in his music, but in his conversations with people — what he was trying to grapple with and trying to figure out. For example, when he was charged with that sexual assault case in New York City back in the '90s, one of the things he said to me in the famous prison interview from Rikers Island is that he takes responsibility for not stopping those men, his so-called friends, from doing what they did to that young lady, and that he was guilty of that. What man do we know that, at 23 years of age, would actually say something like that? And so I really believe that, had Pac lived, he would have turned some corners in his life around these different issues that dogged him, because he carried around a lot of complexities.

On Tupac's efforts to build his own legacy

I think he knew from the very beginning, "I have a very short window to live, I've got to create a body of work." He was constantly producing, constantly writing, constantly in a recording studio. Even when he was in prison, [he was] writing screenplays. He just knew, I believe, that he wasn't going to be on this earth for a long time, so he came with a certain purpose — contradictions, complexities and all — and he left behind something that has touched generations of people.

• Tupac Shakur

Tupac Shakur (1971-1996)

• Music Artist
• Music Department

IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 4608

• 6 wins & 15 nominations

• Det. Rodriguez

• music editor

• In-development projects at IMDbPro

Personal details

• Apple Music
• 5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
• June 16 , 1971
• East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
• September 13 , 1996
• Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (homicide)
• Keisha Morris April 29, 1995 - 1996 (annulled)
• Parents Afeni Shakur
• Relatives Sekyiwa Shakur (Half Sibling)
• Other works Rapper, released albums "2Pacalypse Now" and "All Eyez On Me", "Strictly for My NIGGAZ", "Me Against The World" and "Thug Life"
• 10 Biographical Movies
• 11 Print Biographies
• 4 Portrayals
• 2 Interviews
• 16 Articles
• 9 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia Recorded close to 150 songs during the final year of his life, and often completed three songs per day in the same period. Shakur also wrote lyrics in the studio and often performed his verses in one take. He felt that rappers who could not perform their verses properly on the first take weren't ready to be rappers. R&B music, on the other hand, was worthy of multiple takes for the vocal tracks, he felt.
• Quotes Everybody's at war with different things...I'm at war with my own heart sometimes". In Vibe interview 2/96
• Trademarks Socially conscious lyrics
• When did Tupac Shakur die?
• How did Tupac Shakur die?
• How old was Tupac Shakur when he died?

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Why Tupac Never Died

In just five years of stardom, Tupac Shakur released four albums, three of which were certified platinum, and acted in six films. He was the first rapper to release two No. 1 albums in the same year, and the first to release a No. 1 album while incarcerated. But his impact on American culture in the nineteen-nineties is explained less by sales than by the fierce devotion that he inspired. He was a folk hero, born into a family of Black radicals, before becoming the type of controversy-clouded celebrity on the lips of politicians and gossip columnists alike. He was a new kind of sex symbol, bringing together tenderness and bruising might, those delicate eyelashes and the “ fuck the world ” tattoo on his upper back. He was the reason a generation took to pairing bandannas with Versace. He is also believed to have been the first artist to go straight from prison, where he was serving time on a sexual-abuse charge, to the recording booth and to the top of the charts.

“I give a holla to my sisters on welfare / Tupac cares, if don’t nobody else care,” he rapped on his track “Keep Ya Head Up,” from 1993, one of his earliest hits, with the easy swagger of someone convinced of his own righteousness. On weepy singles like “Brenda’s Got a Baby” (1991) and “Dear Mama” (1995), he was an earnest do-gooder, standing with women against misogyny. Yet he was just as believable making anthems animated by spite, including “Hit ’Em Up” and “Against All Odds”—both songs that Shakur recorded in the last year of his life, with a menacing edge to his voice as he calls out his enemies by name. That he contained such wild contradictions somehow seemed to attest to his authenticity, his greatest trait as an artist.

He died at the age of twenty-five, following a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, in 1996. Until last month, nobody had been charged in the murder, despite multiple eyewitnesses—a generation’s initiation into the world of conspiracy theories. An entire cottage industry arose to exalt him. Eight platinum albums were released posthumously. His mystique spawned movies, museum exhibitions, academic conferences, books; one volume reprinted flirtatious, occasionally erotic letters he’d mailed to a woman while incarcerated. There appears to be no end to the content that he left behind, and it has been easy to make him seem prophetic: here’s a clip of him foretelling Black Lives Matter, and here’s one warning of Donald Trump ’s greed. Every new era gets to ask what might have happened had Shakur survived.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

This plenitude is the challenge faced by “ Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography ” (Crown), a book that the novelist and screenwriter Staci Robinson began working on nearly a quarter century ago. She first met Shakur, who attended the same Bay Area high school that she had, when he was seventeen. In the late nineties, at his mother’s behest, Robinson began interviewing his friends and family, though the project was soon put on hold. She was asked to return to it a few years ago, and was given access to unpublished materials.

It’s a reverential and exhaustive telling of Shakur’s story, leaning heavily on the perspective of his immediate family, featuring pages reproduced from the notebooks he kept in his teens and twenties. The biography’s publication follows “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a documentary series that premièred, on FX, in April. Robinson was an executive producer on “Dear Mama,” which drew on the same archive of estate-approved, previously unreleased materials as her book, and the works share a common purpose: to complicate Shakur without demystifying him.

She begins, as the artist himself would have preferred it, with his mother. Afeni Shakur was born Alice Faye Williams on January 10, 1947, in Lumberton, North Carolina; about twelve years later she moved to the South Bronx. Williams was academically gifted and attended the High School of Performing Arts, in Manhattan, though she felt out of place among her more affluent classmates and eventually dropped out. In the late sixties, she became interested in Black history and Afrocentric thinking, took the Yoruba name Afeni, and joined a local chapter of the Black Panthers. In 1968, she married Lumumba Shakur—and into a family of political radicals. His father, Salahdeen Shakur, was a revolutionary leader who’d worked closely with Malcolm X. The Shakurs were such a force that others in their circle adopted their surname as a mark of allegiance.

In April, 1969, prosecutors charged her and twenty other Black Panthers with participating in a plot to kill policemen and to bomb police stations and other public places throughout the city. The police relied on undercover informants, one of whom Afeni had long suspected. As Robinson writes, this “was the beginning of what would become a lifelong ‘trust nobody’ mentality.”

The defendants became known as the Panther 21. Supporters raised enough money to get Afeni out on bail. “Because I was articulate, they felt that I would be able to help get them out if I got out first,” she recalled. When the case went to trial, in 1970, Afeni, who was pregnant, defended herself and supported her comrades from the stand. She was clever, charismatic, and relentless in the courtroom, helping her fellow-Panthers gain acquittal in May, 1971. The journalist Murray Kempton, who covered the trial, wrote that Afeni spoke “as though she were bearing a prince.”

Her “trust nobody” mentality was encoded into Tupac Shakur’s very identity. He was born Lesane Parish Crooks in East Harlem in June, 1971, and Robinson explains that the name, borrowed from Afeni’s cellmate, Carol Crooks, was meant to protect him from being seen as a “Panther baby.” Meanwhile, Afeni’s marriage collapsed when Lumumba learned that she had been seeing other men; Tupac’s biological father, whose identity would remain a mystery for years, was a man named Billy Garland.

From the beginning, Afeni saw her son—whom she would rename Tupac Amaru, for the Peruvian revolutionary—as a “soldier in exile.” Robinson depicts her as a devoted, and at times demanding, mother. She enrolled him at a progressive preschool in Greenwich Village—but withdrew him after she came to pick him up and saw him standing on a table and dancing like James Brown. “Education is what my son is here for, not to entertain you all,” she told his teacher. Later that night, as she spanked her son, she reminded him, “You are an independent Black man, Tupac.”

In 1975, Afeni married an adopted member of the Shakur clan, the revolutionary Mutulu Shakur, with whom she had a daughter, Sekyiwa. Despite gestures toward a conventional life, Afeni couldn’t shake her experiences in the sixties, especially her sense of mistrust and vulnerability. She split from Mutulu in the early eighties and moved with Tupac and Sekyiwa to Baltimore, where she struggled with addiction and a larger sense of disillusionment. “It was a war and we lost,” she later explained. “Your side lost means that your point lost. . . . That the point that won was that other point.”

Shakur sometimes felt that his mother “cared about ‘the’ people more than ‘her’ people.” He attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, with the hope of becoming an actor, and fell in with an artsy crowd that included Jada Pinkett. Robinson sees this as a period of self-discovery. He was into poetry and wore black nail polish, recruited classmates for the local chapter of the Young Communist League, and obsessively listened to Don McLean’s “Vincent,” a feathery tribute to the misunderstood genius of van Gogh, who had “suffered” for his sanity: “This world was never meant for one / As beautiful as you.”

Just before his senior year of high school, Tupac and Afeni moved to California, where they would be closer to Sekyiwa, who had gone to live with family friends just north of San Francisco. “He taught us a lot about Malcolm X and Mandela,” a local d.j. recalled, “and we taught him a lot about the streets.” Shakur eventually befriended members of Digital Underground, an Oakland hip-hop group that took inspiration from the energy and the eclecticism of seventies funk. He worked primarily as a dancer before earning a guest verse on Digital Underground’s 1991 hit “Same Song.”

In the early nineties, making it through hip-hop’s hypercompetitive gantlet didn’t guarantee stability. Robinson writes that Shakur considered leaving music for a career in political organizing. His modest, local fame got him a record deal, but it didn’t insulate him from the troubles facing most young Black males. In October, 1991, he was stopped by the police for jaywalking in downtown Oakland. After a brief argument, in which the officers made light of his name, the rapper was put in a choke hold, slammed against the pavement, and then charged with resisting arrest. (He sued the city of Oakland, settling out of court.)

That November, he released his début album, “2Pacalypse Now,” drawing on the slow-rolling, synthesizer-driven funk of the West Coast. His political convictions gave shape to his anger; there was a brightness to his voice which made tales of police brutality, such as “Trapped” (“too many brothers daily headed for the big pen”), seem like an opportunity to organize, not a reason for resignation. “2Pacalypse Now” gained notoriety when Vice-President Dan Quayle demanded that the rapper’s record label recall it, after a self-professed Tupac fan shot a state trooper in Texas. Among aficionados, meanwhile, Shakur became better known for “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” which he wrote after reading a newspaper story about a twelve-year-old Black girl who put her newborn down a trash chute. Shakur avoids judgment, instead pointing to larger forces at play: “It’s sad, ’cause I bet Brenda doesn’t even know / Just ’cause you’re in the ghetto doesn’t mean you / Can’t grow.”

At the heart of the Tupac Shakur mythology is how much of his artistic persona was the result of moments in which he imagined what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes. It speaks to how empathetic—but also how impressionable—he could be. It’s something his fans often debate: Were there simply some poses he could never shake? While working on what became his début album, he had been filming “Juice,” Ernest Dickerson’s movie about four young men juggling friendship and street ambition in Harlem. He played Roland Bishop, whose devil-may-care drive distinguishes him from his pals, and leads him to betray them. Shakur studied Method acting while in high school, and some believe Bishop was the beginning of a series of more sinister characters that Shakur absorbed into his persona.

There are a few clips on YouTube of speeches that Shakur delivered in the early nineties, and they are among the most riveting performances he ever gave. In one, he addresses the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement at a banquet in Atlanta. Shakur, introduced as a “second-generation revolutionary,” regards the room of middle-aged activists, some of whom might have fought alongside his mother, with a punk irreverence. “It’s on, just like it was on when you was young,” he says, casting himself as the new face of the struggle. “How come now that I’m twenty years old, ready to start some shit up, everybody telling me to calm down?” He keeps apologizing for cursing before cursing some more, making light of their respectability politics. “We coming up in a totally different world. . . . This is not the sixties.”

He talked about an initiative called 50 N.I.G.G.A.Z.—a backronym for “Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished”—in which he would recruit one young Black man in each state to build a community-organizing network. This eventually became T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. (“The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fuck Everybody”). The approach was inspired by the Black Panthers and sought to mend the divisions engendered by gang life. By the time he released his triumphant 1993 album, “Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.,” he seemed resolute in his pursuit of politics by other means.

That fall, he went to New York to film “Above the Rim,” the story of a talented basketball player trying to steer clear of a local drug dealer who has taken an interest in his success. Shakur was the villain, and to shape the role he spent time with Jacques (Haitian Jack) Agnant, a local gangster. Agnant was present on a night that became pivotal to Shakur’s life. That November, Shakur, Agnant, and two others were accused of sexual assault by a woman the rapper had met a few days earlier at a club. Shakur claimed to have fallen asleep in an adjoining room, and to have played no role in the alleged abuse.

“When the charge first came up,” he explained in an interview for Vibe magazine, “I hated black women. I felt like I put my life on the line. At the time I made ‘Keep Ya Head Up,’ nobody had no songs about black women. I put out ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ from the bottom of my heart. It was real, and they didn’t defend it. I felt like it should have been women all over the country talking about, ‘Tupac couldn’t have did that.’ ”

This is a challenging moment to weave into a largely flattering biography. Biographies tend to make a life into a series of inevitable outcomes. At times, Robinson’s book invests more in exhaustive detail than in a sense of interiority. We get the family and friends lobbying on Shakur’s behalf. “He was not just angry, but insulted by the charge,” his aunt explains to Robinson. The author continues, “Afeni felt sympathy for the woman, but she never doubted that Tupac was innocent.” (Robinson notes that his accuser “would tell a different story.”)

A song like “Wonda Why They Call U Bitch” (addressed to a “sleazy,” “easy” gold-digger) might be rationalized as so much toxic bravado. It’s much harder to explain away acts of coercion. Fans and journalists struggled with this question at the time. In June, 1995, Vibe printed a letter from his accuser. She denied that Shakur was, as he insisted, in an adjoining room. “I admit I did not make the wisest decisions,” she writes, “but I did not deserve to be gang raped.”

The episode marked the beginning of Shakur’s paranoid descent. In late November, 1994, almost exactly one year later, he was beaten up and robbed in the lobby of a recording studio in New York. During the scuffle, he was shot five times. The following day, he was found guilty of first-degree sexual abuse, a lesser charge among those he faced, but one that still carried a sentence of eighteen months to four and a half years in prison. “It was her who sodomized me,” he declared of his accuser at the time of the trial. (Agnant pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and got probation.) A person of extremes, he expected extremes of those around him. “He definitely believed there were two kinds of women,” Jada Pinkett Smith told Michael Eric Dyson, whose 2001 book, “ Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur ,” helped bring Shakur to the academy. “He had a way of putting you on a pedestal and, if there was one thing you did wrong, he would swear you were the devil.”

Shakur was sentenced in February, 1995. He became convinced that Christopher Wallace (better known as the Notorious B.I.G.) and Sean Combs (then Puffy), who were at the studio the night he was shot, were part of a setup; he thought Agnant was in on it, too. (All three denied involvement.) In the meantime, his legal bills had left him with precarious finances. Suge Knight, the bullying head of Death Row Records, a label with ties to L.A.’s gang underworld, persuaded Shakur to sign with him; soon afterward, its parent label posted bail, so that Shakur could go free while he appealed his conviction. Knight preyed on Shakur’s growing persecution complex. By this time, it was hard to recall that his famous “ THUG LIFE ” tattoo, which was inked across his abdomen in 1992, had once held a political meaning. The struggle was no longer against an unjust establishment; it was between “ridaz and punks,” his fast-living crew and its “bitch” rivals.

He was feverishly productive, sometimes setting up two studios at once and bouncing between them, working on different songs at the same time. Months after his release, Shakur put out a double CD—the first by a solo rapper—called “All Eyez on Me.” Joining Death Row gave his music a fearless and foreboding feel; it sounded both harder and more radio-ready than anything he’d previously done, his raps toggling from hell-raising party boasts to taunting sing-alongs. But there were also moments of penitence, like “Life Goes On” and “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” which some fans later interpreted as prophecies of his demise.

In the ten months following his release, he recorded two additional albums and worked on two films. He had plans for restaurants, a fashion line, a video game, a publishing company, a cookbook, a cartoon series, and a radio show. In her introduction, Robinson explains that Shakur had couch-surfed at her apartment when he was younger and visiting Los Angeles to meet with record labels. He never forgot her kindness. He told her that he was forming a group of women writers to work on screenplays with him. Their first meeting was to be at his Los Angeles condo on September 10, 1996.

The writers’ group would never meet. On September 7, 1996, Shakur attended a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. Afterward, he caught four bullets from a drive-by near the Strip. His death, six days later, mired in mystery, seemed instantly significant. Chuck D, of Public Enemy, soon floated a theory that the rapper was still alive. When Shakur’s first posthumous album was released, in November, fans combed it for clues that he had faked his own death.

Others tried to reconcile the vengeance rap he recorded for Death Row with the conscious ideals with which he’d started out. “It is our duty to claim, celebrate and most of all critique the life of Tupac Shakur,” Kierna Mayo wrote a few months after his demise. In 1997, Vibe published a book collecting its coverage of the artist. “Wasn’t Tupac great when he wasn’t getting shot up? Or accused of rape?” the editor Danyel Smith asks in the introduction. “Wasn’t he just the best when he wasn’t falling for Suge Knight’s lame-ass lines and dying broke? Couldn’t Tupac just have been your everything?” In the Village Voice ,the critic dream hampton wrote, “I believed he’d get his shit together and articulate nationalism for our generation.”

For years, the most plausible explanation for Shakur’s murder was that he fell victim to a feud between two Los Angeles gangs, the Mob Piru Bloods, with which Death Row was associated, and the South Side Compton Crips. In 2019, a Crips leader, Duane (Keffe D) Davis, published “ Compton Street Legend ,” in which he detailed the mounting tensions that led to Shakur’s killing. “Tupac was a guppy that got swallowed up by some ferocious sharks,” Davis wrote. “He shouldn’t have ever got involved in that bullshit of trying to be a thug.” Davis explained that, although he didn’t pull the trigger, he was in the car and supplied the murder weapon. In September of this year, he was finally arrested by the Las Vegas Police Department, and he now faces murder charges. (A former lawyer of his told the New York Times that Davis plans to plead not guilty.)

Rap music has a particular relationship with death—a reminder of the precariousness of Black life. In a recent essay on hip-hop’s long trail of deceased, Danyel Smith lamented that “so much of Black journalism is obituary.” The one-two punch of Shakur’s death in September, 1996, and the Notorious B.I.G.’s the following March taught a generation how to mourn: loudly, defiantly. Perhaps Shakur’s contradictions—the gangster poet who was never exactly a gangster, the actor who could never break character—would have found resolution had he lived longer. At the heart of things was always the question of how to distinguish the persona from the person.

That Shakur left so much behind—a vault of unreleased songs, a startling trove of videotaped interviews, from his high-school years to the last hours of his life, the speeches and performances—is one reason that his career can appear to be a solvable mystery. He could have been a political leader or gone on to even greater success as an actor or a recording artist. What he wanted, however, seemed always to elude him. I remember seeing the February, 1994, issue of Vibe , which featured Shakur in a straitjacket, and the question “ Is Tupac crazy or just misunderstood? ” Maybe a little of both? He took on the world because he was young, convinced that he could turn the pain around him into something else. He trusted nobody; he wished to love everybody. He was, for a long cultural moment, incandescent. But he was never free. ♦

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Tupac was one of the greatest rappers of all time, and here's why

Analysis RN Tupac was one of the greatest rappers of all time, and here's why

Tupac Shakur, known by his stage names 2Pac, Pac, and Makaveli, is regarded as one of the most iconic and influential rappers of all time.

What he brought to hip hop was a level of rawness and a poetic drive in the way he delivered his words.

He had a level of self-empowerment that made people want to listen to what he had to say.

Even today, you could fly anywhere and surely there'd be someone who knows of Tupac. Here's why.

1. He was a master storyteller

Tupac took a lot of early inspiration from the politically-charged music of Public Enemy and Ice Cube.

He also studied theatre as a teenager at the Baltimore School of Performing Arts, and was inspired by Shakespeare.

"[Shakespeare] wrote some of the rawest stories, man," he told the LA Times in 1995.

Tupac's ability to communicate what was going on around him was second to none. It wasn't necessarily about telling a story in the most intricate and detailed of ways, it was about making you feel like you were there seeing what he was seeing.

He also had a real complexity to him. There was a side of him that wanted to just let it all out and cut loose and not care about consequences.

On the other side was that social conscience, showing all the facets of what life was life in the ghetto as a young black male, telling stories that hadn't been heard, and speaking out for the black community.

Songs like Brenda's Got A Baby on his debut studio album, 2Pacalyse Now, highlight that.

It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl from the ghetto who has a baby and ends up slipping into drugs and prostitution and is eventually killed.

2. It's all in the samples

Tupac sampled a range of artists on his records, such as Herbie Hancock, Pink Floyd, Parliament, Joe Cocker, Public Enemy and Stevie Wonder.

Trapped, one of the hit singles from his first record, samples James Brown's The Spank.

Brown is one of the most sampled artists in hip hop, along with Curtis Mayfield. They were both powerful, strong figures for the black community.

It wasn't just a case of choosing a sample because it sounded good; artists and producers would often incorporate people and songs that meant something to them.

Depending on when you were born, you'll either recognise Bruce Hornsby and the Range's The Way It Is as the original, or from Tupac's posthumous hit Changes.

Hornsby's 1986 track addressed issues of poverty, classism, and racial segregation, all things that Tupac experienced firsthand growing up.

The upbeat sound of the chorus is at odds with Hornsby's somewhat defeatist lyrics, claiming "that's just the way it is, things'll never be the same".

But with Tupac's verses calling out racism, war, violence, drugs and police brutality thrust in between, Hornsby's words, re-sung by Talent, start to sound more authentic.

3. The power of his voice

Singers are able to use different parts of their body to produce different sounds.

For example the term "head voice" refers to a person singing high in pitch, and using the part of the voice that resonates from the head.

The "chest voice" range resonates from the chest area.

In the documentary Tupac Shakur: Thug Angel, one of Tupac's early producers, Greg "Shock G" Jacobs, talks about how rappers also project from different parts of their body.

"Slick Rick rhymed from the nasal palate, Nas from the back of his throat, and Pac from the pit of his stomach, which is where his power came from," he said.

Where Biggie Smalls would swing like a jazz horn player, Tupac took inspiration from powerful speakers like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

You can hear and feel the weight and the power of his voice, which made him sound 10 feet tall, when in real life he wasn't that big of a person.

4. Stacks, layers and husk

Another technique Tupac was known for was stacking or layering his vocals, which added another dimension of warmth and rawness to his voice.

This technique is often used by rappers to emphasise certain rhythms, words and phrases. Tupac does it on the track Dear Mama, from his 1995 album Me Against the World.

Stacking vocal lines is very difficult to pull off, if not done well it can disrupt the flow of intricate patterns and phrases can be hard to make out.

Listen to the lyrics "and even though I act crazy/I gotta thank the Lord that you made me". You can hear his voice transition from being quite full to quite husky as he hangs on the final words.

To nail the same rhythm and tone quality every single take is very challenging. But Tupac, who had studied jazz and poetry as well as theatre, had an incredible control of rhythm and was able to layer his vocals very effectively without compromising flow or cohesion.

5. The sense of urgency

In 1995, Tupac served a nine-month sentence on charges of sexual assault, something he strongly denied.

The period between his release from prison and his death almost a year later was very intense.

He came out of jail firing shots; he had a lot to say and made a huge amount of music in this time.

He dived into a world of gangster rap, formed a new group called Outlawz Immortalz and signed to the notorious record label Death Row Records.

In terms of his approach to production, he wasn't focused on the musicality of the songs. Instead he had a real urgency to make music.

You can hear this intensity and urgency in Tupac's delivery on tracks like Hail Mary, from his posthumous album 7 Day Theory.

The song took around 30 minutes to make, and was recorded in a few takes.

Tupac didn't feel the need to be spending time in the studio choosing the right beat or the right kick.

"We don't have time … we don't have the luxury to spend all of this time doing one song," he would say to his crew.

In October of 1996, Tupac was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas that still hasn't been solved. He was 25.

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The Moment It Was Clear Tupac Would be a Star

By Staci Robinson

Staci Robinson

In the spring of 1990, Tupac Shakur was shuttling between Marin City and Oakland, California, restlessly seeking his future. His manager, Atron Gregory, was shopping his demo tape but with little success so far. Meanwhile, activism beckoned. Friends of his mother, the former Black Panther revolutionary Afeni Shakur, had engaged Tupac to become the youth chairman of the New Afrikan Panthers, a youth division of a Black nationalist political group, with responsibilities across the country in Atlanta. This excerpt from the new Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography by Staci Robinson tells the story of when Tupac’s Bay Area friend and supporter Leila Steinberg, realizing that Tupac needed a musical path forward to keep him from heading east, sounded the alarm. 

“Can you do something with Tupac?” Atron asked.

Shock was confused. “What do you mean?”

“Can you take him on the tour with you?”

“What? We’re full.”

“Well, if we don’t do something, we’re gonna lose him.”

“Maybe I can replace one of the roadies?” Shock offered.

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“Tupac was not going to wait for anybody,” recalled Atron. “He was frustrated because he wanted to get out there and show his talents and do what everyone else was doing. If not, he was gonna leave and go somewhere else.”

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During Digital Underground’s set, static and feedback interrupted the volume levels of the microphones. According to Tupac, it ruined their performance. By the time the set ended, he was fuming. As the group walked backstage, Tupac ran over to the sound man and yelled, “You fucked up our sound! And you did that shit on purpose!”

“Pac tried to knock his head off,” Money-B remembered. “He swung at him. I mean, the sound man did actually do something that was way out of line, and everybody really did wanna kick his ass, but Pac was ready to jump on him.” When Money told him to calm down, Tupac grew even more infuriated.

But Tupac was also giving others, including Atron and Shock G, reasons to tell him to calm down. He was always the first to react, ready to challenge any security guard or police officer. They spent many evenings trying to control Tupac’s energy and unpredictability. By the end of the tour, telling Tupac to calm down had become a running joke.

During daily meetings on the tour bus, Tupac was always perched and ready to inject a comment, amend the agenda, or just add his two cents. And after Tupac proved he could carry bags and fulfill his roadie tasks, Shock G asked him to come onstage with the rest of the group to perform as one of the backup dancers.

The moment he stepped onto the stage as a backup dancer, his confidence and charm caught the attention of the female fans in the audience. “Pac was immediately hot with the ladies from city one,” Shock recalled. “That’s when we really knew he was a star. We were already working on his albums. We believed in him. We knew he could rhyme. But we knew he was a star by how the girls reacted.” Even before the first show, during soundcheck, Tupac ended up in the back of the bus with a girl he’d just met that day. Money-B was astounded. “I was thinkin’, How’s this dude gonna come here the very first day and get chicks before me? 

The girl and Tupac created a potentially explosive situation when the bus driver noticed a strange man chasing the bus as it pulled away from the arena. The driver came to a stop and opened up the doors. “Is my girl on there?” the man demanded, evidently a disgruntled boyfriend. A sea of no’s answered loudly from the bus. The bus driver shut the door, leaving the man standing there while she and Tupac hid in the back.

When Shock noticed the adoring response Tupac received from female fans during the show, he decided to give him a shot on the microphone. At first, Tupac freestyled, but that posed a problem; Tupac couldn’t contain himself to just one verse here or there. He instantly started to take over other members’ verses by rapping it with them, or for them. Sometimes, when one of the singers was hitting a chorus and Tupac didn’t like the way it sounded, he would even try to sing over it to keep the audience focused on him. “He would just take the whole show in his hands,” Shock recalled. “I kept feelin’ like Frank in  Scarface,  and he was Tony Montana. He was just tryin’ to flip the whole script.”

Shock asked him to chill. Tupac ignored him. Shock warned him again. But Tupac didn’t care whose turn it was. He didn’t care if he was hired initially just as a roadie. Every time Shock put the mic in his hand, Tupac was on a mission.

“But he wasn’t singing that shit right,” Tupac protested. “You wouldn’t know. You’re not a singer.”

“But we were losin’ the crowd. They weren’t likin’ that shit. I had to do somethin’ to get everyone back into it.”

“How would you like it if someone sang over your parts?” Shock asked.

Tupac cut to the chase. “Fuck that! What? You sending me home?” “Yeah, I’m sending you home,” Shock fired back. Then he yelled loudly to everyone who could hear, “Fuck that! Yeah, Pac’s off the tour!”

But he never went. Instead of accepting that he was fired and leaving that night, Tupac ended up in the lobby congregating with the crew. Shock sat at the piano, with everyone gathered around, freestyling and singing, unwinding from a long day. And there was Tupac rollin’ right along like nothing happened. Like he hadn’t been fired. Like he wasn’t supposed to have found his own way home and be halfway there by now. He couldn’t help himself. He loved his new life and he especially loved the after-show freestylin’ sessions. MC Serch from 3rd Bass was always there, and sometimes Queen Latifah. “Anytime he had a chance to speak out, and that would be in those freestyle sessions, he did. Tupac would wanna go all night,” recalls Money-B.

And so it went, Shock kicking Tupac off the tour, Tupac refusing to go. Shock laughed about it years later. “I used to send Pac home a lot. We’d curse each other out, but two hours later we’d get over it.” Looking back, he summed up his relationship with Tupac by saying, “It was one long argument.”

The buses for the  Fear of a Black Planet  tour offered artists a more luxurious experience — bigger beds and kitchen areas and better TVs — than those for Big Daddy Kane’s tour, but what mattered most to Tupac was who was on the bus. Even though it was expected that each group and their entourage remain on their assigned bus during their travels, Tupac roamed freely, often forming friendships with girls who were part of the adjoining entourages.

One of them was 25-year-old Rosie Perez, a dancer in Heavy D’s act, and at the beginning of a career that would, like Tupac’s, take her far in Hollywood. Enamored and curious, she remembered the first time she saw Tupac. Standing with Heavy D when Tupac took the stage, she was taken by his presence. “That muthafucka is a star!” she yelled out. “And everyone just started to look at him, because I said it, I said it really loud. We were in the wings. And I remember walking out of the wings of the stage down into the front, where security is, so I could watch him. I don’t know why I did that; he just compelled me to do so. That was just his greatness.”

Once the two got acquainted they realized they shared similar backgrounds. After that, they often found themselves sitting next to each other as the buses rolled through the countryside. At one stop on the tour, Tupac asked if he could recite a poem for her. When he was done, Rosie said, “Yo, that’s good. You’re going to write a book of poetry.”

Tupac responded, “I’m going to be bigger than a book.”

Despite the excitement of being on another nationwide tour, there were still moments when Tupac’s troubled family life weighed heavy on his heart. Periodic calls to New York to talk to his sister, Sekyiwa ,  and check in on how Afeni was holding up in Marin City left him uncertain. He knew his mother had a long road ahead of her in beating her drug addiction, but he held on to his hope, believing that she was strong enough to find a path to recovery. Sometimes during these sad and discouraging moments, he would sit alone in his hotel room listening to Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love”:

Suffered from alienation 

Carried the weight on my own

“You always knew when Pac was sad,” Shock recalled, “’cause if you walked by his hotel room and heard that playing, you knew.”

Money-B, too, learned quickly how to navigate Tupac’s moods. The two often roomed together while on tour and grew closer when they discovered they were both children of Black Panthers. Money remembered their conversations often spun from the Panthers and their childhoods to Tupac’s love for and deep connection to his mother. “Tupac would always say, ‘Man, you gotta meet my mom, she’s the shit!’ Whether it was talking about how she was on crack, or whether he was telling me about all the things she taught him and that half the shit that he knew was from her, we’d get into a conversation about something . . . anything, and it’d always lead back to some kind of story about his mom.”

EVEN WITH THE FEELINGS OF SUCCESS on the horizon, Tupac was still a live wire when it came to confrontations with the police. One night they had a hard time getting into a club and the police got involved. Shock was ready to leave, but Tupac jumped into the fray. Shock re- counted, “We all decided we’re gonna walk. Fuck it, we’ll just go to the next club, but because someone raised their voice at Queen Latifah, Pac went off on the police officers.”

But Tupac couldn’t calm down. If there was an officer of any sort nearby, he was on alert, ready to guard against injustice. From Afeni’s teachings that the police were not to be trusted, and all he had seen   in Baltimore and Marin City, Tupac’s reaction became reflexive, the intensity never easing.

When Digital Underground performed at venues in the Bible Belt states, their stage show had to be revised because local laws forbade “crude” acts — a designation that certainly included the humping and dancing with blow-up dolls that had become one of the group’s performance signatures. Instead of leaving out the props, though, the band devised a plan. They would frolic with the dolls as usual, but as soon as the show ended, instead of going backstage where the officers would be waiting, they would jump off the five-foot stage and land in the audience. From there, they could blend in with the crowd, and the police officers who lined the stage wouldn’t be able to find them.

One night, as soon as the show ended, Shock jumped into the audience first, followed by Tupac and Money. While Shock and Money mixed calmly with the fans, ensuring that no attention was brought to them, Tupac sprinted through the audience toward the parking lot. When Money finally made his way outside, he spotted Tupac darting around and hiding behind cars. “He was ducking behind cars like he was on  Mission: Impossible  or something,” Money-B recalled with amusement. In the end, this paranoid, over-the-top behavior made him an obvious suspect to the cops who had rushed outside, leading to his eventual arrest and a night in jail for public misconduct.

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“Why you holdin’ me, man?!” Tupac yelled. “I found the guy! That’s the guy that stole Chuck D’s jacket. Let me go!” By then it was too late. Although it seemed that Tupac was the only one who truly cared about the petty theft, he still earned respect for his efforts. “He created his own legend within that first tour,” Money-B remembered, “where every group and band that was with us went away wondering what was going to happen, what we were going to do with him. But they knew they were gonna see him again.”

Adapted from the book TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography by Staci Robinson. Copyright © 2023 by Amaru Entertainment, Inc.. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Tupac Shakur Biography

Birthday: June 16 , 1971 ( Gemini )

Born In: New York City, New York, United States

Tupac Shakur , better known by his stage name 2Pac, was a highly successful rapper and actor known for his violent and shocking lyrics that earned him many fans as well as critics. Born into a family notorious for their brushes with law, he had no contact with his biological father until he was an adult. Violence was nothing new to the youngster whose mother was imprisoned while pregnant with him. It is no surprise that his music was replete with references to ghettos, street violence, sex, gangs and other social problems he faced while growing up. At the beginning of his career he worked for the alternative hip hop group Digital Underground as a roadie and backup dancer. Eventually the talented young man released his solo debut ‘2Pacalypse Now’ which generated considerable controversy due to the violent nature of its lyrics and became very popular primarily due to this very reason. Even though professionally he was becoming successful, his life became entangled in violence and he had frequent rifts with the police. In addition to his music career, he had also acted in some films. He was a voracious reader and a big fan of Shakespeare. His blooming career was cut short by his brutal death in a drive-by shooting.

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Nick Name: 2Pac, Makaveli

Girlfriend: Kidada Jones

Also Known As: Tupac Amaru Shakur

Died At Age: 25

Spouse/Ex-: Keisha Morris

father: Billy Garland

mother: Afeni Shakur

Born Country: United States

Quotes By Tupac Shakur Died Young

Died on: September 13 , 1996

place of death: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Cause of Death: Assassination

Grouping of People: Black Men

City: New York City

U.S. State: New Yorkers

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Complex. Personal. Fearless. Tupac is authentic and larger than life.

The definitive hip-hop anti-hero, Tupac wrote lyrics that spark conversations about rap, race relations, and young black men in America today.

HALL OF FAME ESSAY

By Alan Light

Tupac was a lightning rod, a screen onto which millions of people projected their feelings about rap, about race, and about the young black man in America. He may be a legend, but he’s hardly a hero. Many young listeners looked up to him, but he himself often seemed to be searching for a leader.

Though his recording career lasted just five years, Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971-1996) is one of the most popular artists in history, with over seventy-five million records sold worldwide.

Back to All Inductees

Nile Rodgers

Conversations with Tupac

"I’m not saying I want to die, but if I got to die, let me die in the line of duty, the duty of the ’hood.”

I first met Tupac Shakur almost five years ago, when John Singleton invited me to do a behind-the-scenes book for his second movie, Poetic Justice . It was early on in preproduction when Tupac was cast, and we were on a location scout. A production assistant was driving the van; John and Tupac were sitting up front, and I sat behind them. It was the end of the day, and we were all talking about John’s recent Academy Award nominations for Boyz N the Hood . Tupac was so clearly enamored of John, discussing scene after scene—what he thought made the movie so special, why he was so excited to be starring in John’s second film.

We started talking about the music in the film, and instead of talking about the rap songs, Tupac brought up the scene where Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, is taking custody of young Tre for the first time. He takes his son to the beach, and as they drive home in their old seventies-model car, a song comes on the radio. The song is “O-o-h Child,” and the music provides the dissolve from Tre’s youth to his teenage years in the ’hood. All of a sudden, Tupac started singing the song: “O-o-h child, things are goin’ to get easier. / O-o-h child, things will get brighter. / Someday, we’ll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun. / Someday, when the world is much brighter...”

Tupac turned to John and said, “I loved that song, man. That shit meant a lot to me.” And it did. In many ways, Tupac exemplified a generation of men who grew up without fathers. Later, he would try to blame his criminal activity on that very fact.

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“You’ve never seen a young black male grow up, but now you have to watch, and you have to help, because my father is not alive,” he told me. “This system took him, so it’s up to everybody else to raise me.”

If Singleton envied Tupac’s rawness, Tupac envied Singleton’s stable family life. “John had a father that cared, but I didn’t have one,” Tupac told me, his voice thick with longing. “He knew that part of my pain, because he know how hard it is to grow up without [a father].”

That day, on the location scout, Tupac asked John why he hadn’t put “O-o-h Child” on the movie soundtrack. John said there had been a problem getting rights and clearances, but two years later Tupac used a sample of the song for his inspirational ode to black women, “Keep Your Head Up.” Hearing the song now always makes me think of Tupac, singing it a cappella.

As happy as he was to make a movie with John Singleton, Tupac had a hard time following rules. Half the time, there were no problems at all, but it wasn’t unusual for Tupac to get high in his trailer, to be hours late to the set in the morning, or to get pissed off for what seemed like no reason at all. Once, toward the end of the shoot, Tupac was told he could have a day off. That morning, the producers decided that they would shoot publicity stills and called Tupac to the set. He arrived with his homeboys and began screaming, “I can’t take this shit. Y’all treat a nigga like a slave.” He stormed off to his trailer and promptly punched in a window. It certainly wasn’t the first time a star has had a fit on a set. But Tupac was a young black male with more than a little street credibility. (I often heard talk that he kept a gun on set, though I never saw one.) At the time, nobody knew how far he was willing to take his mantras about living a “thug life.” There was indignation on the set about being blasted by some young punk, but there was also fear: fear both of Tupac and for Tupac. I believe this was a pattern of concern that those around him felt right up until his death.

The last weeks of the Poetic Justice production were shot in Oakland. Although Tupac endured a nomadic childhood, living in Harlem, the Bronx, and Baltimore, Oakland was where he passed his teen years. His homies there were the last to know him before he made his way into show business—first as a dancer for Digital Underground, then as a featured rapper with the group, and eventually as a solo rapper.

The shoot in Oakland was difficult for a number of reasons. It was the end of a long fourteen-week production that had worn everybody out. Singleton was shooting mostly night scenes, which meant the crew didn’t start until 6:00 P.M. and didn’t finish until dawn. Not ideal working conditions under any circumstances, but especially if you’re shooting in the ’hood. I remember feeling nervous for Tupac. The production assistants had a hard time keeping people away from the set—there was no real security force—and everybody and his dog claimed to be a friend of Tupac’s.

There was always a group of tough-looking guys calling out, “Pac, Pac.” Sometimes they interrupted shooting, and it was worse if they actually caught Tupac’s eye and knew that he saw them. “Don’t pretend that you don’t know me, nigga!” they would threaten. “Nigga’s a movie star and can’t speak to nobody.”

Tupac had more patience with these guys than with anyone else. “Yo, man, it’s good to see you,” he would say, never raising his voice. “But a brother’s trying to work. I’m just trying to make that paper, same as you.” But even after he’d come over, acknowledged them, rapped a little with them, the guys would keep yelling. “Fuck you, nigga,” they would say, trying to provoke a fight and look hard in front of their friends.

To his homies around the way, standing in front of a movie camera and a crew of fifty people, talking to Janet Jackson, wasn’t work. They felt that they knew Tupac, knew that he was no different from them and felt it was their sworn duty to remind him of that.

I asked Tupac about the young men who would harass him on set. “The young bucks are gonna be jealous,” he said as if it couldn’t be helped. “Some older people, too. They got mad because I used to be their gofer. They used to run me to the store. They’re sitting there knowing they used to give me money to go to the store, and now I’ve got their whole family taking pictures with me. That’s an animosity that nothing I can do can kill, because that’s poverty shit and I can understand.”

Dana Smith was a friend of Tupac’s from Baltimore. They met in the eighth grade at Rolling Park Junior High School. Tupac arranged for him to be his assistant on the set. He saw the danger Tupac was in in places like Oakland but insisted that Tupac couldn’t avoid the danger, that he needed to keep up “his street mentality” to handle it.

“People get jealous,” Dana told me. “They see Tupac as a young brother coming up from nothing to something. They’re like ‘Damn, how did he do that? He was homeless a while ago….’ Tupac could try to stay out of trouble, stay in the hotel, but that’s not real. If he did that, people would call him snobby. You can’t get away from the street. That’s where you’re from. You’ve got to give that love back.”

Even then, everybody was always talking about the possibility of Tupac’s death. “Being a young black male,” Dana said, “he’s already reached his life expectancy—twenty-one.”

Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother and a former radical activist, told me that she constantly feared for her son’s life. “It’s funny, because I never believed he would live,” she said. She spent most of her pregnancy in jail, preparing her own defense as a member of the famed New York 21 Black Panthers. (Afeni was married to fellow Panther Lumumba Abdul Shakur.) “Every five years, I’d be just amazed that he made it to five, he made it to ten, he made it to fifteen.”

A beautiful woman who blessed her son with her own clear, dark skin and large, bright eyes, Afeni clenched her hands as she spoke. “I had a million miscarriages, you know,” she said. “This child stayed in my womb through the worst possible conditions. I had to get a court order to get an egg to eat every day. I had to get a court order to get a glass of milk every day—you know what I’m saying? I lost weight, but he gained weight. He was born one month and three days after we were acquitted. I had not been able to carry a child. Then this child comes and hangs on and really fights for his life.”

At the time we last spoke, three years ago, Tupac and Afeni Shakur were living in the San Fernando Valley in a pretty blue-and-white house on a quiet tree-lined street. Tupac teased his mother about showing me family pictures. “I will be suing my mother for giving away those pictures,” he said, holding his mother in a loving embrace. “You’ve got the information when I take this to court—I did not give her permission.”

He also spoke with pride about growing up the son of a Black Panther. “Everybody else’s mother was just a regular mother, but my mother was Afeni—you know what I’m saying?” He turned to his mother and gave her the same cool appraisal that a homie would give an older G in the ’hood. “My mother had a strong reputation. It was just like having a daddy because she had a rep. Motherfuckers get roasted if you fuck with Afeni or her children. Couldn’t nobody touch us.”

Watching Tupac with his mother or his younger sister revealed a side of him that the media rarely portrayed. Gangsta rapper or no, at the end of the day, he was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s cousin.

With other women, Tupac sometimes had problems, leading to his conviction for sexual assault in 1994. He was always proud, however, of never having fathered a child out of wedlock. “Procreation is so much about ego,” he’d muse. “Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell ‘I got fucked by America and you’re about to get fucked, too.’ Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can’t have a child. ’Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I’m not having no white babies.

“There’s no way around it unless I want to turn white, turn my back on what’s really going on in America,” Tupac insisted. “I either will be in jail or dead or be so fucking stressed out from not going to jail or dying or on crack that I’d just pop a vessel,” he said. “I’ll just die from a heart attack. All the deaths are not going to be from the police killing you.”

I asked him if he didn’t think that staying in the Valley, instead of going out and instigating all the trouble he did, would make him live longer. He looked at me as if I were crazy. “It would be an honor to die in the ’hood,” he said solemnly, as if he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Don’t let me die in Saudi Arabia. These motherfuckers are rushing with a flag to die on foreign soil, fighting for motherfuckers that don’t care about us. I’d rather die in the ’hood, where I get my love. I’m not saying I want to die, but if I got to die, let me die in the line of duty, the duty of the ’hood.”

Of all the rumors and conspiracy theories I’ve heard since Tupac died, only one has reverberated inside my head. “I’ve heard that Tupac isn’t really dead,” a friend said. “Why did they cremate the body right away? In Las Vegas, where they had no family or friends?”

I shrugged. I make it a point never to argue down conspiracy theories.

“What I heard is that Afeni has had Tupac’s identity changed and shipped him to Cuba.”

As I listened to my friend, what surprised me was how my heart leaped at the thought of Tupac alive.

That night, I had what was surely one of hundreds of dreams that people across America have had about Tupac. In the dream, I am walking down a street in Havana. The air is thick with the perfume of strong black coffee, and black men in starched white shirts play dominoes on the street. The walls are pastel pink, white, and green, the paint is peeling, the mortar is crumbling. Only the high arches in the doorways and the spiraling staircases that center the apartment buildings are indications of this city’s glorious past.

I walk down a hallway, past overcrowded apartments with no curtains because in Fidel’s Cuba, no one has anything to hide.

“ Estás buscando el negro ?” a woman asks me, a grandmother who I’m sure is a Fidel spy.

“Yes,” I answer in pitch-perfect Spanish. “I am looking for the black guy. He’s my brother.”

She points me to the last door on the floor. I make my way into a tiny studio that is decorated with orange and green crushed-velvet furniture—classy stuff if it were still 1959. Afeni is there. Tupac is there, but he looks nothing like Tupac. I know him only by his voice.

And as each day goes by, it’s that much harder to conjure the ’hood in his mind

He is asking for a CD player. He wants some rap CDs. His mother explains that such music will give him away. She prompts him to listen to his Spanish tapes; he may never go home, so he must learn the language. She directs him to a large stack of books—books about Che Guevara, about Fidel, about Latin-American history. She tells him that his life has been saved for only one purpose—to aid the revolution he was born into.

“Y’all don’t give a nigga much of a choice,” he says, looking around the tiny room and smiling at the woman who has loved him better and more wisely than he ever loved himself. He goes over to the window and looks out, thinking, as he always does, that if he stares hard enough, he can see past the calles of Cuba to his beloved ’hood, where on the corner, someone is playing C-low and someone is smoking crack and someone is playing a Tupac song and someone is laughing and someone is crying. But he can’t see any of it, not really. And as each day goes by, it’s that much harder to conjure the ’hood in his mind. He sits down, puts his feet up on the table, opens a book, and begins to read.

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Hip Hop Scriptures

Tupac Shakur Biography

The digital biography of Tupac Amaru Shakur - from Hip Hop Scriptures virtual Hip Hop Museum!

Tupac Shakur Digital Bio

GOVERNMENT NAME: TUPAC AMARU SHAKUR

Sun sign: gemini, birthday: june 16, hometown: harlem, nyc, ny, hologram performance:.

Hip-Hop Bio:

Tupac Amaru Shakur was an inspiration to millions.

While  2Pac was most famous for his rap career,  he was also a gifted actor, poet and thoughtful while outspoken advocate for the poor and the overlooked in America. During his life, he produced an immense amount of artistic work, which included studio albums, major Hollywood feature films, and published works.  He was most prolific in the music industry, selling over 75 million albums. 2Pac’s unapologetic lyrics were relevant, important, and reflective of the hard lives led by many. His music earned attention and respect through a poetic style that embraced street vocabulary while being innovative. Today, 2Pac is still considered by many to be one of the biggest influences on modern hip-hop.

2Pac’s career has earned him six Grammy nominations and three MTV Video Music Award nominations. In 1997, Shakur was honored by the American Music Awards as the Favorite Hip Hop Artist.

Born on June 16 1971 in New York City, Shakur’s parents were both members of the Black Panther Party whose militant style and provocative ideologies for civil rights would come to influence 2Pac’s music. 

Shakur was born on June 16, 1971, in the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City. He was named after Túpac Amaru, an 18th-century South American revolutionary who was executed after leading an indigenous uprising against Spanish rule. Subsequent to Shakur's death, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (as well as the official coroner's report, which lists "Crooks" as an aka) released his name as Lesane Parish Crooks.

His mother, Afeni Shakur, and his father, Billy Garland, were active members of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The infant boy was born a month after his mother was acquitted of more than 150 charges of "Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks" in the New York "Panther 21" court case.

Shakur lived from an early age with people who were convicted of serious criminal offences and who were imprisoned. His godfather, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a high ranking Black Panther, was convicted of murdering a school teacher during a 1968 robbery, although his sentence was later overturned. His stepfather, Mutulu, spent four years at large on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list beginning in 1982. Mutulu was wanted for having helped his sister Assata Shakur (also known as Joanne Chesimard) to escape from a penitentiary in New Jersey. She had been imprisoned for killing a state trooper in 1973. Mutulu was caught in 1986 and imprisoned for the robbery of a Brinks armored truck in which two police officers and a guard were killed. Shakur had a half-sister, Sekyiwa, two years his junior, and an older stepbrother, Mopreme "Komani" Shakur, who appeared in many of his recordings.

At the age of twelve, Shakur enrolled in Harlem's 127th Street Repertory Ensemble and was cast as the Travis Younger character in the play A Raisin in the Sun, which was performed at the Apollo Theater. In 1986, the family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland. After completing his second year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he transferred to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet. He performed in Shakespeare plays, and in the role of the Mouse King in the ballet The Nutcracker. Shakur, accompanied by one of his friends, Dana "Mouse" Smith, as his beatbox, won many rap competitions and was considered to be the best rapper in his school. He was remembered as one of the most popular kids in his school because of his sense of humor, superior rapping skills, and ability to mix with all crowds. He developed a close friendship with a young Jada Pinkett (later Jada Pinkett Smith) that lasted until his death.

In the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, Shakur says, "Jada is my heart. She will be my friend for my whole life." Pinkett Smith calls him "one of my best friends. He was like a brother. It was beyond friendship for us. The type of relationship we had, you only get that once in a lifetime." A poem written by Shakur titled "Jada" appears in his book, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, which also includes a poem dedicated to Pinkett Smith called "The Tears in Cupid's Eyes". During his time in art school, Shakur became affiliated with the Baltimore Young Communist League USA, and began dating the daughter of the director of the local Communist Party USA.

In June 1988, Shakur and his family moved to Marin City, California, a residential community located 5 miles (8.0 km) north of San Francisco, where he attended Tamalpais High School in nearby Mill Valley. He began attending the poetry classes of Leila Steinberg in 1989. That same year, Steinberg organized a concert with a former group of Shakur's, "Strictly Dope"; the concert led to him being signed with Atron Gregory. He set him up as a roadie and backup dancer with the young rap group Digital Underground in 1990.

At an early age, Tupac’s love for performance and the arts began to show, as he began acting at age 13 and later enrolled in the Baltimore School of the Arts before dropping out at 17. Shakur broke into the music business with rap group Digital Underground as a back-up dancer and roadie. Eventually Shakur released his first solo album in ’91,  2pacalypse Now . 2Pac’s music career began to grow as his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z  included two top 20 pop chart tracks:  I Get Around  and  Keep Ya Head Up .

1991–92: 2Pacalypse Now

Shakur's professional entertainment career began in the early 1990s, when he debuted his rapping skills in a vocal turn in Digital Underground 's "Same Song" from the soundtrack to the 1991 film Nothing but Trouble and also appeared with the group in the film of the same name. The song was later released as the lead song of the Digital Underground extended play (EP) This is an EP Release, the follow-up to their debut hit album Sex Packets. Shakur appeared in the accompanying music video. After his rap debut, he performed with Digital Underground again on the album Sons of the P. Later, he released his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now. Though the album did not generate any "Top Ten" hits, 2Pacalypse Now is hailed by many critics and fans for its underground feel, with many rappers such as Nas , Eminem , Game, and Talib Kweli having pointed to it as inspiration. Although the album was originally released on Interscope Records, rights of it are now owned by Amaru Entertainment. The album's name is a reference to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

The album generated significant controversy. Dan Quayle criticized it after a Texas youth's defense attorney claimed he was influenced by 2Pacalypse Now and its strong theme of police brutality before shooting a state trooper. Quayle said, "There's no reason for a record like this to be released. It has no place in our society." The record was important in showcasing 2Pac's political conviction and his focus on lyrical prowess. On MTV's Greatest Rappers of All Time List, 2Pacalypse Now was listed as one of 2Pac's "certified classic" albums, along with Me Against the World, All Eyez On Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.

2Pacalypse Now went on to be certified Gold by the RIAA. It featured three singles; "Brenda's Got a Baby", "Trapped", and "If My Homie Calls". 2Pacalypse Now can be found in the Vinyl Countdown and in the instruction manual for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, along with the track "I Don't Give a Fuck," which appeared on the in-game radio station, Radio Los Santos.

1993: Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

His second studio album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., was released in February 1993. The album did better than the previous one debuting on number 24 on the Billboard 200. The album contains many tracks emphasizing Tupac's political and social views. This album had more commercial success than its predecessor, and there were noticeable differences in production. While Tupac's first effort had an indie-rap-oriented sound, this album was considered his "breakout" album. It spawned the hits "Keep Ya Head Up" and "I Get Around" and reached platinum status. On vinyl, Side A (tracks 1–8) was labeled the "Black Side" and Side B (tracks 9–16) the "Dark Side." It's known as his tenth-biggest selling album with 1,366,000 units moved as of 2004.

1994: Thug Life, Thug Life: Volume 1 and November shooting

"Thug Life" redirects here. For the film, see Thug Life (film). For the album, see Thug Life: Volume 1.

In late 1993, Shakur formed the group Thug Life with a number of his friends, including Big Syke, Macadoshis, his stepbrother Mopreme Shakur, and Rated R. The group released their only album Thug Life: Volume 1 on September 26, 1994, which went gold. The album featured the single "Pour Out a Little Liquor," produced by Johnny "J" Jackson, who went on to produce a large part of Shakur's album All Eyez on Me. The group usually performed their concerts without Shakur. The album was originally released by Shakur's label Out Da Gutta Records. Due to criticism about gangsta rap at the time, the original version of the album was scrapped and re-recorded with many of the original songs being cut. Among the notable tracks on the album are "Bury Me a G," "Cradle to the Grave," "Pour Out a Little Liquor" (which also appears in the soundtrack to the 1994 film Above the Rim), "How Long Will They Mourn Me?" and "Str8 Ballin'." The album contains ten tracks because Interscope Records felt many of the other recorded songs were too controversial to release. Although the original version of the album was not completed, Tupac performed the planned first single from the album, "Out on Bail" at the 1994 Source Awards. Although the album was originally released on Shakur's label Out Da Gutta, Amaru Entertainment, the label owned by the mother of Tupac Shakur, has since gained the rights to it. Thug Life: Volume 1 was certified Gold. The track "How Long Will They Mourn Me?" appeared later in 1998 from 2Pac's Greatest Hits album.

Shakur was rushed to Bellevue Hospital after a near-fatal shooting in 1994

On the night of November 30, 1994, the day before the verdict in his sexual abuse trial was to be announced, Shakur was shot five times and robbed by two armed men in army fatigues after entering the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan. He would later accuse Sean Combs, Andre Harrell, and Biggie Smalls —whom he saw after the shooting—of setting him up. Shakur also suspected his close friend and associate, Randy "Stretch" Walker, of being involved in the attack. In a documentary, Biggie says that they were in the recording studio and did not know Shakur would be there. Once they heard he was downstairs, Lil' Cease went to get him but came back with news that he had just been shot. When Biggie 's entourage went downstairs to check on the incident, Shakur was being taken out on a stretcher, still conscious and giving the finger to those around.

According to the doctors at Bellevue Hospital, where he was admitted immediately following the incident, Shakur had received five bullet wounds; twice in the head, twice in the groin and once through the arm and thigh. In the documentary " Biggie and Tupac", Tupac's father is interviewed and said that Tupac made a point to show him that no damage was inflicted upon his penis and/or testicles. His father also mentions that when he saw Tupac's groin, he knew that he was his son. He checked out of the hospital against doctor's orders, three hours after surgery. In the day that followed, Shakur entered the courthouse in a wheelchair and was found guilty of three counts of molestation, but innocent of six others, including sodomy. On February 6, 1995, he was sentenced to one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in prison on a sexual assault charge.

A year later on November 30, 1995, Stretch was killed after being shot twice in the back by three men who pulled up alongside his green minivan at 112th Ave. and 209th St. in Queens Village, while he was driving. His minivan smashed into a tree and hit a parked car.

On March 17, 2008, Chuck Philips wrote a Los Angeles Times article stating that Jimmy Henchman, a hip hop talent manager, ordered a trio of thugs to rough up Shakur. The article, which was later retracted by the LA Times because it partially relied on FBI documents which turned out to be forged was thought to be vindicated in 2011 when Dexter Isaac admitted to attacking Tupac on orders from Henchman. Following Isaac’s public confession, Philips corroborated Isaac as one (among many) of his key unnamed sources. In a June 12, 2012 exclusive for The Village Voice, Philips reported that Jimmy Henchman admitted to setting up Tupac's ambush during one of nine "Queen For A Day" proffer sessions with the government in autumn of 2011, according to prosecutors, key evidence supporting Philips' theory of the attack.

1995: Prison sentence, Me Against the World and bail

Shakur began serving his prison sentence at Clinton Correctional Facility on February 14, 1995. Shortly afterward, he released his multi-platinum album Me Against the World. Shakur became the first artist to have an album at number one on the Billboard 200 while serving a prison sentence. Me Against the World made its debut on the Billboard 200 and stayed at the top of the charts for four weeks. The album sold 240,000 copies in its first week, setting a record for highest first week sales for a solo male rap artist at the time. While serving his sentence, he married his long-time girlfriend, Keisha Morris, on April 4, 1995; the couple divorced in 1996. Shakur stated he married her "for the wrong reasons". While imprisoned, Shakur read many books by Niccolò Machiavelli, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and other works of political philosophy and strategy. He wrote a screenplay titled Live 2 Tell while incarcerated, a story about an adolescent who becomes a drug baron.

The album was very well received, with many calling it the magnum opus of his career. It is considered one of the greatest and most influential hip hop albums of all-time. It is his fourth biggest selling album with 2,439,000 units moved to date. Me Against the World won best rap album at the 1996 Soul Train Music Awards.

"Dear Mama" was released as the album's first single in February 1995, along with the track "Old School" as the B-side. "Dear Mama" would be the album's most successful single, topping the Hot Rap Singles chart, and peaking at the ninth spot on the Billboard Hot 100. The single was certified platinum in July 1995, and later placed at #51 on the year-end charts. The second single, "So Many Tears", was released in June, four months after the first single. The single would reach the number six spot on the Hot Rap Singles chart, and the 44th on the Billboard Hot 100. "Temptations", released in August, was the third and final single from the album. The single would be the least successful of the three released, but still did fairly well on the charts, reaching number 68 on the Billboard Hot 100, 35 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks, and 13 on the Hot Rap Singles charts.

1996: All Eyez on Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory

All Eyez on Me was the fourth studio album by 2Pac, released on February 13, 1996 by Death Row Records and Interscope Records. The album is frequently recognized as one of the crowning achievements of 1990s rap music. It has been said that "despite some undeniable filler, it is easily the best production 2Pac's ever had on record". It was certified 5× Platinum after just 2 months in April 1996 and 9× platinum in 1998. The album featured the Billboard Hot 100 number one singles "How Do U Want It" and "California Love". It featured 5 singles in all, the most of any 2Pac album. Moreover, All Eyez On Me (which was the only Death Row release to be distributed through PolyGram by way of Island Records) made history as the first double-full-length hip-hop solo studio album released for mass consumption. It was issued on two compact discs and four LPs. Chartwise, All Eyez on Me was the second album from 2Pac to hit number-one on both the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts. It sold 566,000 copies in the first week of its release, and was charted on the top 100 with the top one-week Soundscan sales since 1991. The album won the 1997 Soul Train R&B/Soul or Rap Album of the Year Award. Shakur also won the Award for Favorite Rap/Hip-Hop Artist at the 24th Annual American Music Awards.

Makaveli The Don - Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, commonly shortened to The 7 Day Theory, is the fifth and final studio album by Tupac Shakur, under the new stage name Makaveli, finished before his death and his first studio album to be posthumously released. The album was completely finished in a total of seven days during the month of August 1996. The lyrics were written and recorded in only three days and mixing took an additional four days. These are among the very last songs he recorded before his fatal shooting on September 7, 1996. In 2005, MTV.com ranked Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory at #9 on their greatest hip hop albums of all time list and, in 2006, recognized it as a classic. The emotion and anger showcased on the album has been admired by a large part of the hip-hop community, including other rappers. Ronald "Riskie" Brent is the creator of the Makaveli Don Killuminati cover painting. George "Papa G" Pryce, Former Head of Publicity for Death Row, claimed that "Makaveli which we did was a sort of tongue and cheek and it was not really to come out and after Tupac was murdered, it did come out. But before that it was going to be a sort of an underground." The album peaked at number one on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and the Billboard 200. The album generated the second-highest debut-week sales total of any album that year, selling 664,000 copies on the first week. This album was certified 4× Platinum on June 15, 1999.

Shakur’s legal battles began after he established his rap career. In the early nineties Shakur faced a wrongful death suit which settled out of court, accusations of assaulting police officers where charges were ultimately dropped, and even an incident where Shakur sustained five gunshot wounds from shooter Dexter Isaac. In 1995 2Pac was sentenced one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in prison for sexual abuse. However, not even prison could slow the success of Shakur’s career.

While incarcerated 2Pac’s latest album at the time,  Me Against the World , was number one in the pop charts and would later go double platinum. Shakur became the first artist to reach number one in the pop charts while serving a prison sentence. Making the most of his time in jail, 2Pac became a passionate reader. Among his favorites were the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance writer whose works were in part the foundation for western political science. Shakur’s appreciation of his work inspired the nickname: Makaveli.

After serving only eight months of his sentence, 2Pac was out on parole thanks to a 1.4 million dollar bond paid by Suge Knight, CEO of Death Row Records. Now signed with Death Row Records, Shakur went on to create  All Eyez on Me , which featured hits  How Do You Want It  and  California Love .

2Pac’s life was cut short in September of 1996 when Shakur became the victim of a drive-by shooting while his car waited on a red light. While Shakur survived the surgery that followed he was pronounced dead almost a week after the attack.

Even today, 2Pac’s influence is wide-spread. From the Library of Congress where his song Dear Mama was added in 2010 to the National Registry, to artists like 11 time Grammy winner Eminem who in an interview with MTV said:

“He made you feel like you knew him. I think that , honestly, Tupac was the greatest songwriter that ever lived. He made it seem so  easy.  The emotion was there, and feeling, and everything he was trying to describe. You saw a picture that he was trying to paint.”

2Pac leaves a legacy of honesty and passion in his songs. Respected by many,  2Pac has become an inspiration for artists and a standard in rap music.

(sources: 2pac.com, wikipedia.org)

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Tupac Shakur Biography

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City, New York. He was named after  Tupac Amaru II , an Incan revolutionary who led an indigenous uprising against Spain and subsequently received capital punishment. The names “Tupac Amaru” and “Shakur” mean Shining Serpent or Royal Serpent in Quechua and Thankful (to God) in Arabic, respectively.

His mother,  Afeni Shakur , was an active member of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Tupac was born just one month after her acquittal on more than 100 charges of “Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks” in the New York Panther 21 court case Tupac grew up around nothing but self-delusion. His mother, thought she was a “revolutionary. ” She called herself “ Afeni Shakur ” and associated with members of the ill-fated Black Panther Party, a movement that wanted to feed school kids breakfast and earn civil rights for African Americans.

During her youth she dropped out of high school, partied with North Carolina gang members, then moved to Brooklyn: After an affair with one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards, she became political. When the mostly white United Federation of Teachers went on strike in 1968, she crossed the picket line and taught the children herself.

After this she joined a New York chapter of the Black Panther Party and fell in with an organizer named Lumumba. She took to ranting about killing “the pigs” and overthrowing the government, which eventually led to her arrest and that of twenty comrades for conspiring to set off a race war. Pregnant, she made bail and told her husband, Lummuba, it wasn’t his child. Behind his back she had been carrying on with Legs (a small-time associate of Harlem drug baron Nicky Barnes) and Billy Garland (a member of the Party). Lumumba immediately divorced her.

Tupac said, “I never knew where my father was or who my father was for sure.” His godfather, Geronimo Pratt, was also a high-ranking Panther. His step-father, Mutulu, was a drug dealer who, according to Tupac, was rarely present to give him the discipline he needed.

Tupac had a half-sister, Sekyiwa , two years his junior, and an older stepbrother, Mopreme “Komani” Shakur , who appeared on many of his recordings.

At the age of twelve, Shakur enrolled in Harlem’s famous “127th Street Ensemble.” His first major role with this acting troupe was as Travis in A Raisin in the Sun . In 1986 Tupac’s mother brought him and his sister to live in Baltimore, Maryland. The Shakurs lived on Greenmount Ave. in East Baltimore. There, Tupac was disliked because of his looks, name, and lack of trendy clothing. He attended Roland Park Middle School, then spent his freshman year at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High.

For his sophomore year Tupac was accepted to the Baltimore School for the Arts. He enjoyed his classes there, studying theater, ballet, and other arts. It was during this time that Tupac became close friends with another student named Jada Pinkett. Even at this young age, Tupac was outspoken on the subject of racial equality. His teachers remembered him as being a very gifted student. He was an avid reader, delving into books on eastern religions, and even entire encyclopedia sets. Hiding his love of literature from his peers, he gained the respect of his peers by acting like a tough guy. Tupac composed his first rap in Baltimore under the name “MC New York”. The song was about gun control and was inspired by the fatal shooting of one of his close friends.

From childhood, everyone called him the “ Black Prince .” For misbehaving, he had to read an entire edition of The New York Times. But she had no answer when he asked about his daddy. “She just told me, ‘I don’t know who your daddy is.’ It wasn’t like she was a slut or nothing’. It was just some rough times. “When he was two, his sister, Sekyiwa, was born. This child’s father, Mutulu, was a Black Panther who, a few months before her birth, had been sentenced to sixty years for a fatal armoured car robbery.

With Mutulu away, the family experienced hard times. No matter where they moved-the Bronx, Harlem, homeless shelters Tupac was distressed. “I remember crying all the time. My major thing growing up was I couldn’t fit in. Because I was from everywhere. I didn’t have no buddies that I grew up with.”

At the age of twelve, Tupac enrolled in Harlem’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble and was cast as the Travis Younger character in the play A Raisin in the Sun, which was performed at the Apollo Theater. In 1986, his family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. After completing his second year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he transferred to the Baltimore School for the Arts. There he studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet. He performed in Shakespeare plays, and in the role of the Mouse King in the ballet The Nutcracker.

In June 1988 , a drug-addicted Afeni was having trouble finding work (her Panther past did not help, either). She uprooted the family again and brought Tupac and Sekyiwa to live with a family friend in Marin City, California,  where Tupac attended Tamalpais High School . He joined the Ensemble Theater Company (ETC) to pursue his career in entertainment.

Tupac move into Leila Steinberg’s home with his friend Ray Luv at the age of seventeen and he eventually dropped out of high school. Leila Steinberg acted as a literary mentor to Tupac, an avid reader.

In August of 1988, Tupac’s stepfather Mutulu was sentenced to sixty years in prison for armed robbery after being on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for several years. Shakur soon moved in with a neighbor and started selling drugs on the street, but also made friends who helped spark his interest in rap music. One of these was Ray Luv, and with a mutual friend named DJ Dize (Dizz-ee), they started a rap group called Strictly Dope . Their recordings were later released in 2001 under the name Tupac Shakur: The Lost Tapes. Their neighborhood performances brought Tupac enough acclaim to land an audition with Shock G of Digital Underground.

Steinberg has kept copies of the books that he read, which include J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans, and the feminist writings of Alice Walker and Robin Morgan. Most of these books were read before the age of twenty. It has been said that Tupac was, in fact, more well-read and intellectually well-rounded at that age than the average student in the first year class of most Ivy League institutions In 1989, Leila Steinberg organized a concert with Tupac’s group, Strictly Dope . The concert lead to him being signed with Atron Gregory who set him up with Digital Underground .

Tupac’s professional entertainment career began in the early 1990s, when he debuted his rapping skills on “ Same Song ” from the Digital Underground album ” This is an EP Release ”. He first appeared in the music video for “ Same Song “. After his rap debut, Tupac performed with Digital Underground again on the album ” Sons Of The P ”.

Later, he released his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now . Initially he had trouble marketing his solo debut, but Interscope Records ‘ executives Ted Field and Tom Whalley eventually agreed to distribute the record.

Tupac claimed his first album was aimed at the problems facing young black males, but it was publicly criticized for its graphic language and images of violence by and against law enforcement.In one instance, a young man claimed his killing of a Texas-based trooper was influenced by the album. Former Vice President Dan Quayle publicly denounced the album as having “no place in our society” 2Pacalypse Now did not do as well on the charts as future albums, spawning no top ten hits.

His second record, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… , was released in 1993. The album, produced mostly in part by Randy “ Stretch ” Walker (Shakur’s closest friend and associate at the time) and the Live Squad , generated two hits, “ Keep Ya Head Up ” and “ I Get Around “, the latter featuring guest appearances by Shock G and Money-B of the Digital Underground .

Shakur’s profile was raised considerably by his acclaimed role in the Ernest Dickerson film Juice, which led to a lead role in John Singleton’s Poetic Justice the following year. By the time the film hit theaters, 2Pac had released his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… , which became a platinum album, peaking at number four on the R&B charts and launching the Top Ten R&B hit singles “I Get Around” and “Keep Ya Head Up,” which peaked at number 11 and 12, respectively, on the pop charts. Late in 1993, he acted in the basketball movie ”Above the Rim”.  Tupac was filming ” Menace II Society ” in the summer of 1993 when he assaulted director Allen Hughes; he was sentenced to 15 days in jail in early 1994. Although Tupac was selling records and earning praise for his music and acting, he began having serious altercations with the law; prior to becoming a recording artist, he had no police record.

By the time he was twenty, Tupac had been arrested eight times, even serving eight months in prison after being convicted of sexual abuse. In addition, he was the subject of two wrongful-death lawsuits, one involving a six-year-old boy who was killed after getting caught in gang-war crossfire between Tupac’s gang and a rival group.

In late 1993, Shakur formed the group Thug Life with a number of his friends, including Big Syke , Macadoshis , his stepbrother Mopreme Shakur , and Rated R . The group released their first and only record album Thug Life Vol. 1 on September 26, 1994. The group usually performed their concerts without Tupac.

The concept of “Thug Life” was viewed by Tupac as a philosophy for life. He developed the word into a backronym standing for “ The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody “. He declared that the dictionary definition of a “thug” as being a rogue or criminal was not how he used the term, but rather he meant someone who came from oppressive or squalid background and little opportunity but still made a life for himself and was proud. In 1994, he was found guilty of sexual assault . The day after the verdict was announced, he was shot by a pair of muggers while he was in the lobby of a New York City recordings studio. Shakur was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison on February 7, 1995.

He married his long-time girlfriend, Keisha Morris , while serving his sentence. This marriage was later annulled. While imprisoned, Shakur read many books by Niccolo Machiavelli, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and other works of political philosophy and strategy.

Read for Keisha Morris, here .

He also wrote a screenplay titled ” Live 2 Tell ” while incarcerated, a story about an adolescent who becomes a drug baron.

After serving eleven months of his one-and-a-half year to four-and-a-half year sentence, Tupac was released from the penitentiary, due in large part to the help and influence of Marion “ Suge ” Knight, CEO of Death Row Records. Knight posted $1.4 million bail pending appeal of the conviction, in exchange for which Shakur was obligated to release three albums for the Death Row label.

It debuted at number one upon its February release, and would be certified quintuple platinum by the fall. Although he had a hit record and, with the Dr. Dre duet “California Love,” a massive single on his hands, Shakur was beginning to tire of hip-hop and started to concentrate on acting. During the summer of 1996, he completed two films, the thriller Bullet and the dark comedy Gridlock’d, which also starred Tim Roth. He also made some recordings for Death Row, which was quickly disintegrating without Dre as the house producer, and as Knight became heavily involved in illegal activities.

The album presents a stark contrast to previous works. Throughout the album, Tupac continues to focus on the themes of pain and aggression, making this album one of the emotionally darker works of his career. Tupac wrote and recorded all the lyrics in only three days and the production took another four days, combining for a total of seven days to complete the album (hence the name). The album was completely finished before Shakur died and Shakur had complete creative input on the album from the name of the album to the cover, which Shakur chose to symbolize how the media had crucified him. The record debuted at number one and sold 663,000 copies in the first week. Tupac had plans of starting Makaveli Records which would have included Outlawz, Wu-Tang Clan, Big Daddy Kane, Big Syke, and Gang Starr.

On the night of September 7, 1996, Shakur attended the Mike Tyson – Bruce Seldon boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. After leaving the match, one of Suge Knight’s associates spotted 21 year-old Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson , a member of the Southside Crips, in the MGM Grand lobby and had Shakur aware. Shakur immediately rushed Anderson and knocked him to the ground. Shakur’s entourage, as well as Knight and his followers assisted in beating down Anderson. The fight was captured on the hotel’s video surveillance. A few weeks earlier, Anderson and a group of Crips robbed a member of Death Row’s entourage in a Foot Locker store, precipitating Shakur’s onset. After the brawl, Shakur went to rendezvous with Knight to go to Death Row-owned Club 662 (now known as restaurant/club Seven).

He rode in Knight’s 1996 black BMW 750i sedan as part of a larger convoy with some of Tupac’s friends, Outlawz, and bodyguards. At 10:55 p.m., while paused at a red light, Shakur rolled down his window and a photographer took their photo at around 11:00-11:05 p.m., they were halted on Las Vegas Blvd. by Metro bicycle cops for playing the car stereo too loud and not having license plates. The plates were then found in the trunk of Knight’s vehicle; they were released without being fined a few minutes later.

At about 11:10 p.m., while stopped at a red light at Flamingo Road near the intersection of Koval Lane in front of the Maxim Hotel, a vehicle occupied by two women pulled up on their right side. Shakur, who was standing up through the sunroof, exchanged words with the two women, and invited them to go to Club 662. At approximately 11:15 p.m., a white, four-door, late-model, Cadillac driven by unknown person(s) pulled up to the sedan’s right side, rolled down one of the windows, and rapidly fired around twelve to thirteen shots at Tupac.

At the time of the drive-by, Tupac was riding alongside Knight, with his bodyguard following behind in a vehicle belonging to Kidada Jones, Shakur’s then-fiance. The bodyguard, Frank Alexander, stated that when he was about to ride along with the rapper in Knight’s car, Shakur asked him to drive Kidada Jones’ car instead just in case they were too drunk and needed additional vehicles from Club 662 back to the hotel. Shortly after the assault, the bodyguard reported in his documentary, ” Before I Wake” , that one of the convoy’s cars drove off after the assailant but he never heard back from the occupants. After arriving on the scene, police and paramedics took Knight and a fatally wounded Shakur to the University Medical Center. According to an interview with one of Shakur’s closest friends and music video director Gobi, while at the hospital, he received news from a Death Row marketing employee that the shooters had called the record label and were sending death threats aimed at Shakur, claiming that they were going there to “finish him off”.Upon hearing this, Gobi immediately alerted the Las Vegas police, but the police claimed they were understaffed and no one could be sent.Nonetheless, the shooters never arrived.At the hospital, Shakur was in and out of consciousness; heavily sedated, breathed through a ventilator and respirator, was placed on life support machines, and was ultimately put under a barbiturate-induced coma after repeatedly trying to get out of the bed. Despite having been resuscitated in a trauma center and surviving a multitude of surgeries (as well the removal of a failed right lung), Shakur had gotten through the critical phase of the medical therapy and had a 50% chance of pulling through Gobi left the medical center after being informed that Shakur made a 13% recovery on the sixth night.While in Critical Care Unit on the afternoon of September 13, 1996, Shakur died of internal bleeding; doctors attempted to revive him but could not stop his hemorrhaging.

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How Biggie and Tupac Went From Friends to Music's Biggest Rivals

Two rappers on the rise to hip-hop stardom became fast friends — and even faster enemies, which may have led to their untimely passings.

What exploded into arguably the biggest rivalry in music history, ended up in the death of both artists, just as their careers were skyrocketing. Tupac (also known as 2Pac) was gunned down on September 7, 1996, and died six days later, while Biggie (also known as the Notorious B.I.G.) was shot and killed six months later on March 9, 1997.

Neither murder has ever been solved. But one thing that there’s no question about is that they started off as friends.

READ MORE: Inside Tupac's Last Days

Tupac entered the music scene two years before Biggie

Born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City as Lesane Parish Crooks, Tupac’s single mother moved the family often in an attempt to escape the high-crime areas. They first went to Baltimore and then to Marin City, California. It was there that Tupac’s love and talent for poetry was bred. He eventually broke into the music business, first as a roadie and dancer for the group, Digital Underground. He eventually he took the mic in 1991, with his debut album, 2Pacalypse Now , released that year.

Meanwhile, back in New York City, Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, was raised in Brooklyn, spent his teen years attending prestigious high schools (where English was a strong subject), dealing drugs in the streets and rapping for fun. “It was fun just hearing myself on tape over beats,” he said in his biography for Arista Records.

But a demo he made found its way to Source magazine, which spotlighted the young talent — and he was soon represented by Sean “Diddy” Combs (also known as “Puffy Daddy”). His first single, “Party and Bulls**t” came out in 1993.

Biggie asked Tupac to be his manager

By that year, Tupac was already a platinum-selling artist, so Biggie asked a drug dealer to introduce him to Tupac at a Los Angeles party, according to a Vice excerpt of the book Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff.

“'Pac walks into the kitchen and starts cooking for us. He's in the kitchen cooking some steaks,” an intern named Dan Smalls who worked with Biggie recalled of the meeting. “We were drinking and smoking and all of a sudden ‘Pac was like, ‘Yo, come get it.’ And we go into the kitchen and he had steaks, and French fries, and bread, and Kool‑Aid and we just sittin’ there eating and drinking and laughing...that's truly where Big and ‘Pac’s friendship started.”

There was mutual respect between the two, as well as their friend groups. According to the Vice excerpt, EDI Mean, a friend of Biggie’s, said, “We all thought he was a dope rapper.” The story reports that Tupac gave Biggie a Hennessy bottle as a gift. Biggie would crash on Tupac’s couch when he was in California and Tupac would always stop by Biggie’s neighborhood when he was in New York. In essence, they were like any other pair of friends.

And the potential greatness of their combined talents was also evident. At the 1993 Budweiser Superfest at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, they freestyled together. Biggie often turned to Tupac for advice in the business — and even asked him to manage his career. But Tupac didn’t mix business with friendship: “Nah, stay with Puff. He will make you a star.”

Tupac believed Biggie had a hand in his 1994 gun down

While there were some smaller kerfuffles between Tupac and Biggie, the first big fallout happened when they were scheduled to work on a project together for another rapper, Little Shawn.

Tupac arrived at Times Square’s Quad Recording Studios on November 30, 1994, and was getting ready to head upstairs to where Biggie and Combs were. But instead, Tupac was gunned down in the lobby and shot five times, according to the New York Time s .

He survived the attack but believed Biggie might have something to do with it, even though they did make it upstairs to see them right after the incident. “Tupac said the crew looked surprised and guilty, but Puffy claimed they showed him ‘nothing but love and concern,’” according to the Vice excerpt.

READ MORE: Inside Notorious B.I.G.'s Final Days and Drive-By Murder in Los Angeles

When Tupac joined Death Row Records, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry was cemented

While Tupac was incarcerated for another incident, he came to believe Biggie knew about the attack ahead of time. The west coast rapper reached out to Suge Knight, who offered him a place on his Death Row Records roster. Tupac accepted, cementing the rivalry between Knight's label and Combs’ Bad Boy Records. “Any artist out there that wanna be an artist, stay a star, and won’t have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancing—come to Death Row!” Knight proclaimed at that 1995 Source awards show.

There was never proof that Biggie or Combs knew about the incident. But a couple of months later, Biggie’s B-side single was a track called “Who Shot Ya?” which led to Tupac’s response with the song, “Hit ‘Em Up.” In it, Tupac claimed he slept with Biggie’s wife, Faith Evans. According to Vibe , Evans denied the claim, saying, “That ain’t how I do business.”

The punches continued to be thrown throughout their short lives, each side blaming the other for the deaths (while other theorists believe they may still be alive).

But after Tupac’s death, Biggie wanted to put an end to the coast-to-coast fighting. “We two individual people, we waged a coastal beef...one man against one man made a whole West Coast hate a whole East Coast. And vice versa. And that really bugged me out,” he said in an interview . “I've got to be the one to try to flip it... because Pac can't be the one to try to squash it because he's gone.”

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Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography Hardcover – October 24, 2023

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date October 24, 2023
• Dimensions 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.4 inches
• ISBN-10 1524761044
• ISBN-13 978-1524761042
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From the Publisher

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (October 24, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524761044
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524761042
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.72 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.4 inches
• #44 in Rap & Hip-Hop Musician Biographies
• #50 in Rap Music (Books)
• #730 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

About the author

Staci robinson.

Staci Robinson is an author and screenwriter. Her previous projects and collaborations include Tupac Remembered, Bearing Witness to a Life and Legacy; the novel Interceptions; the film The Bounce Back; and the forthcoming FX documentary Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur. Staci graduated from UCLA with a degree in History. She currently lives with her family in Northern California.

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‘He never stopped being hurt’: Tupac Shakur and the women who shaped him

Kevin e g perry speaks to the rapper’s godfather jamal joseph and staci robinson, the author of the newly published ‘tupac shakur: the authorized biography’, about shakur’s legacy and the guiding influence of his mother.

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T his June, when Tupac Shakur belatedly received his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame , a crowd of hundreds turned out for the occasion. Pressing up against steel barricades, they rapped his songs and chanted his name. Almost three decades after his death, Shakur still feels powerfully alive. He was a star for just five years, from the release of debut album  2Pacalypse Now  in 1991 to his death in 1996 at just 25 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas , for which nobody was charged until a few months ago . Despite the brevity of his time in the spotlight Shakur released four albums – three of which went platinum – and appeared in six films. That work – and the 75 million record sales that followed – have ensured a kind of immortality. It’s no coincidence Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg brought him back as a hologram for Coachella a decade ago. Apparently untroubled by death, Shakur has always stayed relevant.

While Shakur may now be an icon to millions, when Staci Robinson first met him he was just an incredibly confident 17-year-old with a notepad full of ideas. They attended the same high school, a few years apart, and Robinson went on to become a novelist and screenwriter. They kept in touch, with Shakur inviting Robinson to join a scriptwriting group he was planning to put together out of a desire to create female characters with authentic perspectives and voices. The first meeting was scheduled for 10 September 1996, three days after Shakur was shot and fatally wounded.

A few years later Shakur’s mother Afeni, who died in 2016, asked Robinson to write a book about her son. After months of interviews with those who knew him best the project was put on hold, where it remained until Robinson’s involvement in last year’s museum exhibit Wake Me When I’m Free and this year’s documentary miniseries  Dear Mama.  As with those projects, her newly published  Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography takes Shakur off his pedestal as one of the greatest rappers of all time and instead lets us see him as a mother’s son, shaped first by Afeni’s revolutionary politics and then often again by the women he spent time with.

“Afeni spoke of him with great pride,” says Robinson. “She watched her son take the values she instilled in him and hope for change in the world, for society to become a more equal playing ground. As she watched Tupac become a young man, she saw that his hopes were actually the things that caused him the most pain. To live in a world that he was taught wasn’t equal for all and a world where hope and change weren’t embraced by the larger society became very hard for him. He never stopped being hurt by that one basic thing.”

Robinson’s book picks up its story two years before Shakur’s birth, in the early hours of 2 April 1969. That morning, Afeni and her husband Lumumba were arrested along with 19 other members of the New York branch of the Black Panther Party, accused of planning violent attacks on police stations and other sites across the city. Afeni would go on to personally represent the group, while pregnant with Shakur, in what became known as the “Panther 21” trial. After putting together her own legal defence, they emerged victorious after 13 months and the entire group was acquitted of all charges.

Jamal Joseph, the youngest member of the Panther 21, and Shakur’s godfather, witnessed firsthand the care Afeni – and her sister Gloria “Glo” Cox – took in raising her son and his younger sister Sekyiwa. When the young Shakur did get out of line, her preferred method of punishment was to make him sit at the kitchen table and read the day’s  New York Times  aloud, front to back. This began from the age of three.

“Listen, Glo would be the first to tell you that he got some spankings!” remembers Joseph with a chuckle. “It wasn’t all just intellectual punishment! But first and foremost, Afeni wanted him not just to read the  Times  but to be able to discuss it, to teach him to think critically. For children, especially in poor communities, education is ‘learn and repeat’. You don’t learn critical thinking until you go to college. She gave him that.”

Joseph remembers Shakur’s love of performance being obvious from an early age. “You’d go by the house and Tupac and the cousins would be organising their little talent shows,” he recalls. “Tupac would be giving out parts and whatever it was, he was the star!” It was little surprise, then, when Shakur chose to pursue acting and enrolled at the Baltimore School for the Arts in 1986, at the age of 15. It was there he began a formative friendship with classmate Jada Pinkett, after first meeting at a school assembly for students in the theatre department. Robinson quotes Pinkett as recalling that initial meeting: “Once you paid attention to him, he kind of sucked you in. We hit it off from that moment on… We were lifelong friends.”

Pinkett’s friendship and encouragement helped Shakur pursue an acting career that ran alongside burgeoning rap fame. His first major part was as troubled teen Roland Bishop in 1992’s  Juice , and between film roles he found time for a cameo appearance in Pinkett’s sitcom  A Different World,  playing her streetwise ex-boyfriend Piccolo – and for once, not getting the girl.

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In 1993, Shakur starred opposite Janet Jackson in John Singleton’s romantic drama  Poetic Justice.  During a tense moment on set, Shakur almost came to blows with an extra and was calmed down by an unlikely figure: poet Maya Angelou. She was appearing in a cameo, as in the film her work is given to Jackson’s character, the titular “poetic” Justice. As Robinson’s book recounts, Angelou took Shakur to one side. “Let me speak to you,” she said, before reminding him of his history. “Do you know that hundreds of years of struggle have been for you?” Angelou later recalled the moment in an interview: “He started to weep. The tears came down. That was the Tupac Shakur. I took him, I walked him down into a little gully, and kept his back to the people so they wouldn’t see him, and I used my hands to dry his cheeks.”

For Joseph, this incident is a prime example of the importance Shakur placed on female role models. Of course, for some this may jar with the fact that later in 1993 Shakur was convicted and served prison time on sexual abuse charges. He always maintained his innocence, and the women in his life stood by him. “When he was accused of the rape charges, Tupac would say: ‘I was raised by women, I love women.’ That wasn’t just a throw off,” says Joseph. “You hear a lot of people say that, who have done some kind of misdeed, but he understood what matriarchy was in the Black community. From Afeni, from Glo, and from the elder women. I’m sure that in addition to the reverence he would have for Dr Angelou as an artist and activist, he also recognised that this is an elder Black woman speaking to me. Let me just take a deep breath and calm down and listen to what she has to say.”

In 1994, the year before his death, Shakur wrote one of his most powerful and emotionally resonant songs as a tribute to his mother. “Dear Mama”, which doesn’t flinch from discussing Afeni’s own history with addiction as well as the gifts she gave him, has gone on to be regarded as a high point in both Shakur’s career and rap history. In 2010, it was selected for inclusion into the Library of Congress on the grounds of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. Afeni lived to see her son’s work recognised on the highest stages. “She was very proud of the legacy he left behind,” says Robinson. “Afeni said that in his passing she knew that he would continue to inspire. She spoke with great pride of all that Tupac accomplished in his life, and believed that he lived 25 perfect years.”

We can only imagine what Shakur might have done had he been given more than those few short years to live, but Robinson’s book makes it plain how staggering it is he achieved what he did before that night in Las Vegas. He was inspired, says Joseph, by the hope, the intellectual acuity and the radical education he got from his mother. “Afeni knew from the time she was carrying Tupac, and certainly at the moment of his birth, that she had given birth to a Black boy in a society that kills Black boys. That undermines Black boys. That imprisons Black boys,” he says. “So I think that from the time he was born, she wanted to whisper into his ear and speak power to him, and strengthen his mind, knowing that would be his strongest weapon.”

‘Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography’ by Staci Robinson is out now

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47 Facts About Tupac Shakur

Written by Clemmy Bolin

Modified & Updated: 01 Jun 2024

Reviewed by Sherman Smith

Tupac Shakur, a name that resonates through the annals of hip-hop history. Born on June 16, 1971, in East Harlem, New York City, Tupac quickly rose to fame as not just a rapper, but also an actor and activist. With his influence spanning beyond the realms of music, Tupac became an icon for his raw authenticity, powerful lyrics, and unapologetic approach to addressing social issues.

In this article, we delve into 47 fascinating facts about Tupac Shakur that showcase the complexity and impact of his life. From his tumultuous upbringing to his groundbreaking albums , from his brushes with the law to his enduring legacy, we explore the many facets that made Tupac an indelible figure in popular culture.

Key Takeaways:

• Tupac Shakur, a legendary rapper and actor, used his music to address social issues and inspire change, leaving a lasting impact on the world of music and popular culture.
• Despite his tragic death, Tupac’s influence continues to inspire new generations, showcasing the power of music to empower and advocate for social justice.

Tupac was born in East Harlem, New York City.

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in East Harlem, a neighborhood known for its vibrant culture and diverse communities.

His parents were both members of the Black Panther Party.

Tupac’s parents, Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland, were activists and members of the Black Panther Party , a revolutionary organization fighting for civil rights.

He was named after Túpac Amaru II, the 18th-century Peruvian revolutionary leader.

Tupac Shakur’s name was inspired by Túpac Amaru II, who led an indigenous uprising against Spanish colonial rule in Peru.

Tupac’s family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, when he was young.

During his early childhood, Tupac and his family relocated to Baltimore, where he began to develop an interest in the arts.

He attended the Baltimore School for the Arts.

Tupac enrolled in the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting, poetry, jazz, ballet, and other creative disciplines.

Tupac’s acting career started with a role in the film “Juice” (1992).

His breakthrough in the film industry came with his role as Bishop, a troubled teenager , in the drama thriller “Juice.

He joined the hip-hop group Digital Underground as a backup dancer.

Prior to launching his solo career, Tupac became a member of the hip-hop group Digital Underground, where he gained experience as a backup dancer and rapper.

His debut solo album “2Pacalypse Now” was released in 1991.

At the age of 20, Tupac released his first solo album , “2Pacalypse Now,” which showcased his socially conscious lyrics and poetic storytelling.

Tupac was known for his outspokenness on social and political issues.

Throughout his career, Tupac used his music and public platform to address topics such as racism, poverty, police brutality, and the struggles faced by marginalized communities.

He starred in several successful films, including “Poetic Justice” (1993) and “Above the Rim” (1994).

Tupac’s acting prowess shone in films such as “Poetic Justice,” where he starred alongside Janet Jackson , and “Above the Rim,” a sports drama.

Shakur’s mother founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation after his death.

Following Tupac’s untimely death, his mother, Afeni Shakur , established the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation to honor his memory and support arts and education initiatives.

Tupac’s iconic “Thug Life” tattoo became a symbol of his philosophy.

The tattoo across Tupac’s abdomen, which read “Thug Life,” represented his belief in living with resilience and standing up against social injustice.

He had a close friendship with actress Jada Pinkett Smith.

Tupac and Jada Pinkett Smith , the wife of actor Will Smith, shared a deep friendship formed during their time at the Baltimore School for the Arts.

The song “Dear Mama” is a heartfelt tribute to his mother.

One of Tupac’s most beloved tracks, “Dear Mama ,” was a heartfelt homage to his mother, Afeni Shakur, expressing his gratitude and love for her unwavering support.

Tupac was involved in a highly publicized feud with The Notorious B.I.G.

The rivalry between Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. , also known as Biggie Smalls, intensified after Tupac was shot multiple times in New York City.

He was shot and killed in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996.

Tupac’s life was tragically cut short when he was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. He passed away on September 13, 1996, at the age of 25.

Numerous conspiracy theories surround Tupac’s death.

The circumstances surrounding Tupac’s death have sparked various conspiracy theories, with many speculating about the involvement of rival artists or even government agencies .

His posthumous albums sold millions of copies.

Even after his death, Tupac’s music continued to resonate with fans worldwide, and posthumously released albums like “All Eyez on Me” and “The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory” achieved tremendous commercial success.

He was nominated for multiple Grammy Awards.

Tupac received several Grammy Award nominations throughout his career, recognizing his artistic contributions to the hip-hop genre .

Shakur’s influence on hip-hop is undeniable.

Tupac’s impact on the hip-hop industry is immeasurable, as he used his music to shed light on social issues and inspire a generation of artists.

His lyrics often reflected the struggles of the inner-city youth.

Tupac’s introspective and poignant lyrics explored the harsh realities faced by impoverished communities, resonating with those who could relate to his experiences.

He was the first solo rapper to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 2017, Tupac Shakur became the first solo rapper to be inducted into the prestigious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, solidifying his status as a music icon.

Shakur’s poetry collection was published posthumously.

After Tupac’s passing, a collection of his poetry titled “ The Rose That Grew from Concrete” was published, offering deeper insight into his creativity and thought processes.

Tupac had a strong affinity for Shakespeare.

Tupac admired William Shakespeare and found inspiration in his works, often integrating references to the playwright’s themes and characters in his own music.

He was a vocal advocate for the empowerment of African Americans.

Tupac believed in the importance of uplifting the African American community, using his platform to encourage self-awareness and social change.

Shakur’s estate continues to release new music and documentaries.

Even after his death, Tupac’s music and legacy live on through the ongoing release of unreleased tracks and documentaries about his life and influence.

He was a talented poet, often incorporating spoken word elements into his music.

Tupac showcased his poetic abilities through his music, seamlessly blending rap and spoken word to create a unique and powerful artistic expression.

Tupac’s love for his fans was evident in his performances.

Known for his energetic and passionate stage presence, Tupac always aimed to connect with his audience and make them feel acknowledged and appreciated.

His iconic bandana tied around his head became a signature fashion statement.

Tupac’s sense of style, including his trademark bandana worn as a headband, influenced fashion trends in the 1990s and beyond.

He released multiple successful albums during his career.

Tupac’s discography includes several critically acclaimed albums , such as “Me Against the World,” “Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.,” and “The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.”

Tupac was known for his multi-dimensional storytelling in his music.

Through his powerful storytelling abilities, Tupac painted vivid pictures and shared narratives that touched the hearts of listeners around the world.

He showed support for marginalized communities through his philanthropy.

Tupac’s philanthropic efforts included supporting organizations dedicated to empowering impoverished communities and providing opportunities for underprivileged individuals.

Shakur was vigilant about his personal safety.

Being involved in several altercations and incidents, Tupac became increasingly aware of the dangers that came with his fame and took measures to protect himself.

He was an accomplished poet from a young age.

Tupac’s talent for poetry was evident from a young age, and he began writing and performing his own poetry by the age of twelve.

Tupac’s lyrics often addressed the flaws and corruption in society.

With lyrics that dissected social issues and called for change, Tupac fearlessly confronted the systemic problems plaguing society.

His songs continue to inspire new generations of artists.

Tupac’s influence extends beyond his time, inspiring countless artists who continue to carry his legacy and deliver socially conscious music.

Shakur was an advocate for promoting unity among East and West Coast rappers.

Tupac aimed to bridge the gap between East and West Coast rap scenes, advocating for unity and dismissing the idea of an ongoing rivalry.

He had a strict work ethic and recorded an extensive amount of music.

Tupac’s dedication to his craft led him to record an extensive amount of music, resulting in a vast catalog of unreleased material.

He was known for his charismatic and magnetic personality.

Tupac’s charm and magnetic energy allowed him to effortlessly draw people towards him, leaving a lasting impression on those who encountered him.

2Pac’s impact extends beyond music, influencing art, fashion, and popular culture.

Tupac’s influence transcends the realm of music, permeating art, fashion, and pop culture, shaping the landscape of the 1990s and beyond.

He had a complicated relationship with the media.

Tupac often felt misrepresented by the media and expressed frustration with the way his image and words were distorted, leading to misunderstandings.

Shakur’s lyrics were poetic, poignant, and deeply personal.

Tupac’s lyrical prowess allowed him to express his innermost thoughts and emotions with poetic grace, leaving a profound impact on listeners.

He starred in the film “Gridlock’d” alongside Tim Roth.

In “Gridlock’d,” Tupac played the lead role of Ezekiel “Spoon” Whitmore, showcasing his versatility as an actor.

Tupac is one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

With over 75 million records sold worldwide, Tupac remains one of the best-selling music artists in history.

He frequently collaborated with other iconic artists.

Tupac collaborated with numerous renowned artists , including Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Eric B . & Rakim , creating timeless tracks that still resonate with fans today.

Shakur’s music touched on the struggles of the African American community.

Tupac used his platform to shed light on the injustices faced by the African American community, giving a voice to the voiceless .

Tupac Shakur’s legacy continues to inspire and empower.

Despite his untimely death, Tupac’s impact on music, culture, and social activism continues to inspire and empower generations to rise above adversity and fight for a better world .

These 47 facts about Tupac Shakur provide a glimpse into the life, career, and impact of one of the most influential figures in the history of music. From his thought-provoking lyrics to his captivating performances, Tupac left a legacy that will forever be remembered.

References:

Tupac Shakur was a legendary figure in the world of music and entertainment. His impact on hip-hop culture and his immense talent as a rapper and actor continue to resonate with fans around the globe. From his troubled upbringing to his rise to stardom, Tupac’s life was marked by both triumphs and tragedies. He used his music as a platform to address important social issues, becoming a voice for the oppressed and marginalized. Despite his untimely death, Tupac’s legacy lives on, inspiring future generations of artists and activists. His influence on the music industry is undeniable, and his songs remain iconic and timeless. Tupac Shakur will always be remembered as a remarkable artist who left a lasting impact on the world.

1. When and where was Tupac Shakur born?

Tupac Shakur was born on June 16, 1971, in East Harlem, New York City, New York, USA.

2. What were Tupac’s most famous songs?

Tupac had numerous hit songs, but some of his most famous ones include “California Love,” “Changes,” “Dear Mama,” “Keep Ya Head Up,” and “Hit ‘Em Up.”

3. How did Tupac die?

Tupac Shakur was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996. He succumbed to his injuries six days later on September 13, 1996.

4. What was Tupac’s impact on the hip-hop industry?

Tupac was a trailblazer in the hip-hop industry, using his music to address social issues and shed light on the struggles of the African-American community. He was known for his raw and powerful lyrics, which resonated with fans and made him one of the most influential artists of his time.

5. Did Tupac Shakur have any acting career?

Yes, Tupac had a successful acting career. He appeared in several films, including “Juice,” “Poetic Justice,” “ Above the Rim ,” and “Gridlock’d,” showcasing his talent and versatility as an actor.

6. What is Tupac’s legacy?

Tupac Shakur’s legacy extends beyond his music and acting. He was a cultural icon, advocating for social justice and using his platform to speak out against inequality. His music continues to inspire and resonate with fans, and his influence on the hip-hop industry is still evident today.

Tupac Shakur's life, music, and legacy continue to captivate fans worldwide. Explore more intriguing facts about this iconic rapper , from his astonishing accomplishments to the fascinating details behind his film roles and the inspiring story of his mother, Afeni Shakur . Uncover the secrets behind Tupac's enduring impact on hip-hop culture and beyond, as you delve into the depths of his artistry and personal life. Join us on this journey of discovery, as we pay tribute to one of the most influential figures in music history.

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Judge considering if ex-gang leader held in Tupac Shakur killing gets house arrest on $750K bail

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, arrives in court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, listens as Cash Jones testifies via video in court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. Jones put up the bail for Davis. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny presides during at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Carl Arnold, attorney for Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, speaks in court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, center, waits to appear in court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, right, talks to his attorney, Carl Arnold, in court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Carl Arnold, attorney for Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of orchestrating the 1996 slaying of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur, speaks during a news conference after court at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, June 25, 2024. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

FILE - Rapper Tupac Shakur attends a voter registration event in South Central Los Angeles, Aug. 15, 1996. A Nevada judge is being asked to decide Tuesday, June 25, 2024, if a former Los Angeles-area gang leader will be freed from jail to house arrest ahead of his murder trial in the 1996 killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur. (AP Photo/Frank Wiese, File)

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LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Nevada judge said Tuesday she wasn’t immediately convinced of the legality of an effort by a hip-hop music figure to underwrite a $750,000 bond to free a former Los Angeles-area gang leader from jail ahead of his murder trial in the 1996 killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas.

Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny expressed doubts after hearing arguments about granting Duane “Keffe D” Davis’ release to house arrest with electronic monitoring, but said she would review financial records submitted by his benefactor — Cash Jones, a music record executive who has managed performers such as rappers The Game and Blueface. In recent years, he’s gotten into street fights and made controversial comments about the late Tupac Shakur and Nipsey Hussle.

The judge promised to post a brief description of her decision in the court record. She did not say when.

Davis’ attorney, Carl Arnold, told reporters outside court that he hoped for a decision later Tuesday. Prosecutors Binu Palal and Marc DiGiacomo declined to comment.

Jones, who uses the moniker “Wack 100,” offered sworn testimony by internet video link from an unspecified place in California. Under questioning by Arnold, Jones said he paid 15% of the bail amount, or $112,500, as “a gift” from his business accounts to secure Davis’ release.

“I know him in passing,” Jones said of Davis, a 61-year-old self-described head of a Crips gang sect in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton who has been held at the Clark County Detention Center since his arrest last September. Davis and his attorneys have said he isn’t getting proper medical care in jail following treatment before his arrest for colon cancer.

“I know his son,” Jones said of Davis. “We talked a few times. I know he’s having an issue with his health.”

“He’s always been a monumental person in our community,” Jones added during questioning by Palal. “Especially the urban community.”

Asked by the prosecutor if he had any contract or financial agreement with Davis for a television or movie deal based on Davis’ self-described gang life and role in the killing of Shakur, Jones twice said, “Not as of yet.”

Nevada has a law sometimes called a “slayer statute” that prohibits convicted killers from profiting from their crime. Jailhouse visits and telephone calls are also routinely recorded.

The prosecutor played clips from a VladTV social media interview in which Jones told his interviewer he would bail Davis out of jail “in return for an agreement to do a series on Mr. Davis’ life.” Palal asked Jones to explain.

“That’s what I said to Vlad,” Jones responded, noting that he was paid for the interview to draw viewers. “There’s nothing about Vlad, nothing about YouTube, that says you have to be truthful.”

Palal also played a recording of a jailhouse phone call in which Jones describes to Davis a plan to produce “30 to 40 episodes” of a television show based on his life story.

“We talking business. I’m telling you what my idea is,” Jones says. “You gotta remember bro, this (expletive) can set you up for the rest of your life.”

Palal told the judge that Jones intended to profit from Davis’ story.

“Mr. Davis is getting the benefits from retelling his story in the killing of Mr. Shakur. As a result, Mr. Jones, in order to benefit from that, is paying the bail bond company,” the prosecutor said. “Although it’s convoluted, it’s clear that a fraud is being perpetrated on this court. One way or another ... it is an illegal benefit, profiting from this crime.”

The judge ended the 45-minute hearing saying she was “left with more questions than answers.” But she agreed to review Jones’ financial records.

Davis has sought to be released since shortly after his arrest last September made him the only person ever charged with a crime in a killing that for 27 years has drawn intense interest and speculation.

Davis told Kierny in court in February that backers were “hesitant to come in here and help me out on the bail because of the media and the circus that’s going on.”

Prosecutors allege the gunfire that killed Shakur stemmed from competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre known at the time as “gangsta rap.”

Davis has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. His trial is scheduled Nov. 4. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

According to police, prosecutors and Davis’ own accounts, he is the only person still alive among four people who were in a white Cadillac from which shots were fired in September 1996, mortally wounding Shakur and grazing rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection just off the Las Vegas Strip. Knight, now 59, is serving 28 years in a California prison for using a vehicle to kill a Los Angeles-area man in 2015.

Davis has publicly described himself as the orchestrator of the shooting, but not the gunman. A renewed push by Las Vegas police to solve the case led to a search warrant and raid last July at his home in Henderson.

Prosecutors say they have strong evidence to convict Davis of murder based his own accounts during multiple police and media interviews since 2008 — and in a 2019 memoir of his life leading a Compton street gang.

In his book, Davis wrote he was promised immunity to tell authorities in Los Angeles what he knew about the fatal shootings of Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace six months later in Los Angeles. Wallace was known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls.

Arnold maintains that Davis told stories so he could make money and that police and prosecutors in Nevada lack key evidence including the gun, the Cadillac and proof that Davis was in Las Vegas at the time of the shooting.