Tupac Shakur

Decades after his 1996 murder, artist and actor Tupac Shakur remains one of the top-selling and most influential rappers of all time.

tupac shakur in a white shirt and black vest, with a black bandana on his head

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Latest News: Man Charged with the Murder of Tupac Shakur

Quick facts, early life: mom, siblings, and more, move to california and rise to fame, legal problems and serving jail time, joining death row records and ‘all eyez on me’, tupac and biggie smalls: the story of “hit ’em up”, movies and other work, romantic relationships: madonna, ex-wife, and more, murder investigation, who was tupac shakur.

One of the top-selling artists of all time, rapper and actor Tupac Shakur embodied the 1990s gangsta-rap aesthetic and, in death, has become an icon symbolizing noble struggle. Tupac began his music career as a rebel with a cause to articulate the still-relevant travails and injustices endured by many Black Americans. The boundaries between his art and life became increasingly blurred, as Shakur faced legal problems and jail time. On his fourth album, All Eyez On Me , Tupac leaned fully into celebrating the thug lifestyle. It was the last album Tupac would live to see released. On September 7, 1996, the 25-year-old was gunned down in Las Vegas and died six days later. Police continue to investigate his murder.

FULL NAME: Tupac Amaru Shakur (born Lesane Parish Crooks) BORN: June 16, 1971 DIED: September 13, 1996 BIRTHPLACE: New York, New York SPOUSE: Keisha Morris (1995-1996) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born Lesane Parish Crooks on June 16, 1971, in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. His mother, Afeni Shakur , had been a political activist and Black Panther Party member who was arrested in 1969 for allegedly planning coordinated attacks on police stations and offices in New York City. She became pregnant with Tupac while out on bail, and she was acquitted in 1971 after defending herself in court.

afeni shakur looks to her left off camera in this black and white photo, she is holding a film camera and wears glasses on her head and a turtle neck and vest

When Lesane was 1 year old, Afeni changed his name to Tupac Amaru after a Peruvian revolutionary who was killed by the Spanish. She said of the name : “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.” Tupac later took his surname from his sister Sekyiwa’s father, another Black Panther named Mutulu Shakur. Tupac also had a stepbrother, Mopreme.

Tupac’s father, Billy Garland, lost contact with Afeni when Tupac was 5, and he didn’t see his dad again until he was 23. “I thought my father was dead all my life,” he told the writer Kevin Powell during an interview with Vibe magazine in 1996. “I felt I needed a daddy to show me the ropes, and I didn’t have one.” Raising Tupac and his half-sister alone , Afeni worked as a paralegal before developing a crack cocaine addiction in the early 1980s. The family had to move often, struggling for money and living off welfare because she couldn’t keep a job.

tupac shakur and two friends post for a photo, tupac is in the middle and holds some cash in one hand

Friendship with Jada Pinkett-Smith

In 1984, the family moved to Baltimore, where Tupac enrolled at the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts, where he said he was “the freest I ever felt.” This was also where Tupac met the future actor Jada Pinkett-Smith . He wrote poems about her, and she had a cameo in his music video for “Strictly 4 My Niggaz.” Pinkett-Smith later told reporters that she was a drug dealer when she met Tupac, and that she resented the way the movie All Eyez on Me (2017) later “reimagined” their relationship: “It wasn’t just about, oh, you have this cute girl, and this cool guy, they must have been in this—nah, it wasn’t that at all. It was about survival, and it had always been about survival between us.”

Tupac’s Baltimore neighborhood was riven by crime, so the family moved to Marin City, California. It turned out to be a “mean little ghetto,” according to Vanity Fair . It was in Marin City that Afeni succumbed to her crack addiction—a drug that Tupac sold on the same streets where his mother bought her supply. Her behavior led to a falling out between mother and son.

Tupac’s love for hip-hop steered him away from a life of crime (for a while, at least). At 17, in the spring of 1989, he struck up a friendship with Leila Steinberg, who he met when she was hosting holding poetry lessons in an Oakland park, according to Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur by Michael Eric Dyson. Already, Tupac had been obsessively writing poetry and convinced Steinberg, who had no music industry experience, to become his manager. She was eventually able to get Tupac in front of music manager Atron Gregory, who secured a gig for him in 1990 as a roadie and backup dancer for the hip-hop group Digital Underground.

He soon stepped up to the mic, making his recording debut in 1991 on “Same Song,” which soundtracked the Dan Aykroyd comedy Nothing but Trouble . Tupac also appeared on Digital Underground’s album Sons of the P that October. After Gregory also became Tupac’s manager, he landed the up-and-coming rapper a deal with Interscope Records. A month after Sons of the P hit the stores came 2Pacalypse Now , Tupac’s debut album as a solo artist.

Tupac often complained that he was misunderstood. “Everything in life is not all beautiful,” he told journalist Chuck Phillips. “There is lots of killing and drugs. To me a perfect album talks about the hard stuff and the fun and caring stuff... The thing that bothers me is that it seems like a lot of the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed.”

As Tupac first began to achieve success as a rapper, Afeni was unaware of his career until friends told her. “I didn’t know what was happening to my son,” she said . “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’” Afeni became determined to break out of her drug addiction, which she finally did after moving back to New York City in 1991. Tupac and his mother later reconciled and remained close the rest of his life.

tupac shakur wearing no shirt and jeans, and a bandana on his head, singing into a microphone on a darkened stage

Tupac, who only released four albums in his lifetime, has 21 albums to his name, 10 of which have earned platinum, multiplatinum, or diamond certification. As of July 2023, the Recording Industry Association of America listed Tupac as the 45 th top-selling artist of all-time by album sales and streaming figures. Worldwide, more than 75 million Tupac records have sold to date, according to Forbes .

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Tupac’s first album as a solo artist was  2Pacalypse Now  (1991). Although it didn’t yield any hits, it sold a respectable 500,000 copies and established Tupac as an uncompromising social commentator on songs such as “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” which narrates an underaged mother’s fall into destitution, and “Soulja’s Story,” which controversially spoke of “blasting” a police officer and “droppin’ the cop.” The song was cited as a motivation for a real-life cop killing by a teenage car thief called Ronald Ray Howard and was condemned by then–U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle,  who said , “There is absolutely no reason for a record like this to be published... It has no place in our society.” With those words, Tupac’s notoriety was guaranteed.

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

Tupac’s second album dropped in February 1993. It continued in the same socially conscious vein as his debut. On the hit song “Keep Ya Head Up,” he empathized with “my sisters on the welfare,” encouraging them to “please don’t cry, dry your eyes, never let up.” The single was gold-certified by the end of the year and reached platinum status in 2021. The album featured contributions from Tupac’s stepbrother, Mopreme. Mopreme became a member of the hip-hop group Thug Life, which Tupac started and which released the album  Thug Life: Volume 1  in 1994.

Me Against the World

When Tupac’s third solo album came out on March 14, 1995, he was in jail. Its title,  Me Against the World , couldn’t have been more apt. It reached No. 1 in the Billboard 200 chart and is considered by many to be his magnum opus—“by and large a work of pain, anger and burning desperation,”  wrote Cheo H. Coker  of Rolling Stone. But there was vulnerability, too. The lead single, “Dear Mama,” was a  tear-jerking tribute to his mother , Afeni, that hit No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1995.

All Eyez On Me

The final album Tupac released in his lifetime was 1996’s  All Eyez On Me , his first after signing to Death Row Records.  All Eyez on Me , which featured hit songs “California Love” and “How Do U Want I,” remains one of the rapper’s most successful albums.

Posthumous Albums

Tupac recorded six studio albums that were released following his death. The first,  The  Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory , dropped in November 1996, just eight weeks after he was killed, reaching No. 1 on the charts. Other posthumous albums included 1997’s  R U Still Down? (Remember Me) ,  Until the End of Time  (2001),  Better Dayz  (2002),  Loyal to the Game  (2004), and  Pac’s Life  (2006). Additional compilation and live albums have also been released. 

In April 2017, Tupac was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame , one of music’s highest honors. He was the first solo hip-hop artist to be inducted and was selected in his first year of eligibility.

In August 1992, Tupac was attacked by jealous kids in Marin City. He drew his pistol but dropped it in the melee. Someone picked it up, the gun fired, and a 6-year-old bystander, Qa’id Walker-Teal, fell dead. Although Tupac wasn’t charged for Walker-Teal’s death, he was reportedly inconsolable. In 1995, Walker-Teal’s family brought a civil case against Tupac but settled out of court after an unnamed record company—thought to have been Death Row—offered compensation of between $300,000 to $500,000.

In October 1993, Tupac shot and wounded two white off-duty cops in Atlanta, one in the abdomen and one in the buttocks, after an altercation. However, the charges were dropped after it emerged in court that the policemen had been drinking, had initiated the incident, and that one of the officers had threatened Tupac with a stolen gun.

Tupac noted the case illustrated the misrepresentation of Black men in America and the attitude of some police toward them, which he had been talking about in his music. What was portrayed as gun-toting “gangster” behavior by a lawless individual turned out to be an act of self-defense by a young man in fear of his life. All the while, Tupac’s star continued to rise.

Unable to escape punishment entirely, Tupac went to jail for 15 days in 1994 for assaulting movie director Allen Hughes, who had fired him from the set of Menace II Society for being disruptive.

He faced much more serious charges in February 1995, when Tupac was sentenced to between 1.5 and 4.5 years of jail time for sexually abusing a woman. The case related to an incident that had taken place in Tupac’s suite in the New York Parker Meridien hotel in November 1993. Tupac maintained that he hadn’t raped the fan, though he confessed to the Vibe magazine journalist Kevin Powell that he could have prevented others who were present in the suite at the time from doing so. “I had a job [to protect her], and I never showed up,” he said .

While Tupac was in prison on rape charges, he was visited by Suge Knight, the notorious head of Death Row records. Knight offered to post the $1.3 million dollar bail Tupac needed to be released pending his appeal. The condition was that Tupac sign on to Death Row, which Tupac did. He was released from the high-security Dannemora facility in New York in October 1995. Even as he was glorifying an outlaw lifestyle for Death Row, Tupac was financing an at-risk youth center, bankrolling South Central sports teams, and setting up a telephone helpline for young people with problems, according to Vanity Fair .

Tupac’s debut for Death Row, the double-length album All Eyez on Me , came out in February 1996. With his new hip-hop group Outlawz debuting on the album, All Eyez on Me was an unapologetic celebration of the thug lifestyle, eschewing socially conscious lyrics in favor of gangsta-funk hedonism and menace. Dr. Dre , who had pioneered G-funk with NWA, produced the album’s first single, “California Love,” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains Tupac’s best-known song. The third single from the album, “How Do You Want It,” also topped the chart. Within two months of its release, All Eyez on Me had been certified five-times double-platinum. It would eventually become diamond-certified, reaching more than 10 million combined sales and streams.

a black and white photo of the notorious big standing next to a car parked on a city street, rolling a cigar, with several people in the background looking at the camera

Before Tupac released his third album, he became a target. In November 1994, he was shot multiple times in the lobby of the Manhattan recording studio Quad by two young Black men. Tupac believed his rap rival Biggie Smalls was behind the shooting, for which nobody has ever been charged. Smalls always denied he knew anything about the incident. In 2011, Dexter Isaac, a New York prisoner serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime, claimed music executive James “Henchman” Rosemond paid him to steal from Tupac and that he shot the rapper during the robbery.

In June 1996, Tupac released a diss track, “Hit ’Em Up,” aimed at Biggie Smalls and his label boss at Bad Boy Records, Sean “Diddy” Combs . The song ratcheted up the tension between East and West Coast rap. In the inflammatory song, Tupac also spat venom at artists Lil Kim , Junior M.A.F.I.A., and Prodigy of Mobb Deep. Tupac and Biggie’s rivalry was fast becoming hip-hop’s most famous—and ugliest—beef.

“Hit ’Em Up” seemed to chillingly presage Tupac’s death and the ensuing conspiracy theories: “Grab ya Glocks, when you see Tupac; Call the cops, when you see Tupac, uh; Who shot me, but ya punks didn’t finish; Now ya bout to feel the wrath of a menace.”

Within three months, Tupac was murdered. Six months after that, Biggie was, too. Neither murder has been solved.

Along with his music, Tupac pursued an acting career. He appeared in several movies, among them starring roles alongside Janet Jackson in 1993’s Poetic Justice and Mickey Rourke in 1996’s Bullet .

After Tupac died, a collection of poems he wrote before becoming a rapper was also compiled and released in a 2000 book called The Rose that Grew from Concrete . “The world moves fast and it would rather pass u by / than 2 stop and c what makes you cry,” reads one verse he wrote as a teenager.

tupac shakur, wearing a white sweater and blue bandana, and madonna, wearing a pink see through shirt, sit at a table with several bottles of alcohol and glasses of water, speaking with raquel welch, who wears a black sleeveless shirt

Tupac briefly dated pop star Madonna . However, while serving time in prison in January 1995, Tupac wrote a letter to Madonna ending their relationship because of her race. “For you to be seen with a Black man wouldn’t in any way jeopardize your career—if anything it would make you seem that much more open and exciting,” he wrote . “But for me, at least in my previous perception, I felt due to my ‘image,’ I would be letting down half of the people who made me what I thought I was.”

Tupac married Keisha Morris in April 1995 while he was still in prison. The couple had met several months earlier at a nightclub when Morris was 20 and Tupac was 21. Their marriage was annulled 10 months later after Tupac was released from jail. The pair remained friends until his death.

Soon after his marriage to Morris ended, Tupac began dating Kidada Jones . They had met at a club when Tupac apologized for insulting her father, Quincy Jones , for only dating white women. Jones was in Las Vegas with Tupac the night he was shot.

black car in which rapper tupac shakur was fatally shot by unknown driveby assassins as he was riding w friend death row records pres marion suge knight, who survived shooting, behind police tape at crime scene

Tupac died in Las Vegas on September 13, 1996, from gunshot wounds inflicted six days prior. He was 25. His murder remains unsolved.

On September 7, Tupac was in Las Vegas with Suge Knight to watch a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand hotel. There was a scuffle after the bout between a member of the Crips gang and Tupac. Knight, who was involved with the rival Bloods gang, and members of his entourage piled in. Later, as a car that Tupac was sharing with Knight stopped at a red light, a man emerged from another car and fired 13 shots, hitting Tupac in the hand, pelvis, and chest. Tupac later died at the hospital. His girlfriend Kidada and his mother Afeni were both with him in his final days.

Tupac’s body was cremated. Members of his old band, Outlawz, made the controversial claim that they had smoked some of his ashes in honor of him. His mother announced she would scatter her son’s ashes in Soweto, South Africa, the “birthplace of his ancestors,” on the 10 th anniversary of his murder. She later changed the date to June 16, 1997—Tupac’s 26 th birthday as well as the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising.

Police have yet to determine who killed Tupac, and his death remains an open homicide case.

In early 2018, BET aired an episode of Death Row Chronicles in which former Crips member Duane “Keffe D” Keith Davis admitted that he was riding in the car with the man who killed Tupac; he declined to identify the shooter in the interview, revealing only that the shots “came from the back seat,” though he had earlier told federal investigators that the gun was in the hands of his now-deceased nephew Orlando Anderson.

The revelation fueled the launch of a change.org petition that called for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to declare the case “cleared.” It also led to rumors that new arrest warrants were pending, but the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department denied those rumors.

In July 2023, news broke about a possible breakthrough in the investigation. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department executed a search warrant at a home in Henderson, Nevada, on July 17 in connection with the rapper’s unsolved murder. Authorities haven’t shared many details, such as what they were looking for and whether there’s a suspect, citing the ongoing investigation.

On September 29, Davis was arrested and charged with murder for his role in Tupac’s death. He was was indicted by a grand jury in Clark County, Nevada, and is in custody, according to prosecutors.

Tupac Conspiracies: Is Tupac Alive?

a mural of tupac shakur on a brick wall, with the words live by the gun die by the gun around it, along with stop the violence, and rip tupac shakur

Tupac died of gunshot wounds in 1996. However, conspiracy theories have raged ever since he was shot, because his murder has never been solved. Fans have speculated that Tupac faked his death. On his song “Life Goes On,” Tupac rapped about his funeral. His song “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” was released two days after he died. There have been several reported potential Tupac “sightings” since his death, including in 2012 by Kim Kardashian .

In September 2017, music executive Suge Knight hinted that Tupac might be alive in an interview. “When I left that hospital me and ’Pac was laughing and joking. I don’t see how someone can go from doing well to doing bad,” he said , adding that “with Pac you never know” if he could be alive and living in secret somewhere.

In November 2017, A&E aired the six-part Biography Presents: Who Killed Tupac? , which followed civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on his investigation into key theories behind Tupac’s 1996 killing.

  • My mama always used to tell me, “ If you can ’ t find somethin ’ to live for, you best find somethin ’ to die for. ”
  • No matter who committed the crime, they yell at me. And the media is greedier than most.
  • I’m a reflection of the community.
  • The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.
  • Wars come and go, but my soldiers stay eternal.
  • I feel close to Marvin Gaye , Vincent van Gogh , because nobody appreciated his work until he was dead. Now it ’ s worth millions.
  • I’m doing this for the kid who truly lives a “ thug life ” and thinks it ’ s hopeless.
  • During your life, never stop dreaming. No one can take away your dreams.
  • When I die and they come for me, bury me a G.
  • Live by the gun. Die by the gun.
  • In my death, people will understand what I was talking about.
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biography of 2pac shakur

POET. ACTOR. Rapper. Activist. REVOLUTIONARY.

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated and prolific figures in modern history. Shakur’s message has continued to resonate throughout the world as his loyal and adoring fan base continues to treasure the timeless messages that he incorporated into his poetry and his music. 

biography of 2pac shakur

With over 75 million records sold worldwide, both 1996’s All Eyez on Me and his Greatest Hits collection have been certified diamond, surpassing the ten-million mark and placing them among the top-selling albums of all time.In April of 2017, Tupac was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, making him the first solo hip-hop artist to be recognized for inclusion in his first eligible year. Tupac also found success and critical acclaim as an actor, starring in films like  Juice ,  Poetic Justice ,  Above The Rim ,  Gridlock’d , and  Gang Related . 

biography of 2pac shakur

As Tupac’s life and legacy continues to impact, influence and transcend cultures throughout the world. In 2015, the GRAMMY Museum opened Tupac’s first museum exhibit, All Eyez on Me: The Writings of Tupac. In 2022,  Tupac Shakur: Wake Me When I’m Free , a fully immersive, thought-provoking museum experience that explored the life and legacy of the acclaimed artist and activist opened in Los Angeles, CA. In 2023, FX released  Dear Mama : a multi-part docu series on Tupac and his mother Afeni, garnering the “most watched” docuseries in the network’s history.

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Tupac shakur (1971-1996).

biography of 2pac shakur

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Tupac Shakur, the son of two Black Panther members, William Garland and Afeni Shakur, was born in East Harlem, New York on June 16, 1971, and named after Jose Gabriel Tupac Amaru II, an 18th century political leader in Peru who was executed after leading a rebellion against Spanish rule. Tupac’s parents separated before he was born.  At the age of 12, Shakur performed in A Raisin in the Sun with the 127th Street Ensemble. Afeni and Tupac later moved to Baltimore, Maryland where he entered the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts as a teenager.  While at the school, he began writing raps and poetry.  He also performed in Shakespearian plays and took a role in The Nutcracker.

In June 1988, Shakur and his family moved to Marin City, California where he joined the Ensemble Theater Company (ETC) to pursue a career in entertainment. Seventeen-year-old Shakur became an avid reader absorbing books such as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River , Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , and the feminist writings of Alice Walker and Robin Morgan.

Shakur’s professional career began in 1991 with his hit single “Same Song.”  Later that year he appeared in Sons of the P , the first of his eight films.  He also recorded his first solo album 2Pacalypse Now .  In 1993, Shakur formed the group Thug Life with a few of his friends and his stepbrother Mopreme Shakur.  The group released their only album, Thug Life: Thug Life Vol 1 on September 26, 1994.  Despite his short five-year professional career (1991-1996) Shakur became the best selling hip-hop artist in the world with over 75 million albums sold including 44 million in the U.S.

Tupac Shakur also gained notoriety for his violent life and his conflicts with the law. In October 1993, in Atlanta, Georgia, Shakur shot two off-duty police officers who he claimed were harassing a black motorist.  The case was dropped when it was disclosed that the officers were intoxicated.  The following year he was convicted of assaulting a former woman employer while on a music video set. The day before the guilty verdict was handed down on December 1, 1994, Shakur was shot five times in a Manhattan recording studio.  Entering the courthouse in a wheelchair, he was sentenced to 15 days in jail with additional days on a highway work crew as community service, and a $2,000 fine. In April, 1996 he served 120 days in jail for violating the terms of his probation.  On September 7, 1996, shortly after attending the Mike Tyson –Bruce Seldon boxing match in Las Vegas, Nevada Shakur was wounded in a drive-by shooting. He died of his wounds six days later at the age of 25.

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Jonathan Jones, T upac Shakur Legay (New York: Atria Books, 2006; Jacob Hoye, Tupac: Resurrection (New York: Atria Books, 2003; Jonathan Jones, “Tupac Comes to Life for Bay Area Teens”. Northgate News Online , U.C.-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Nov. 18, 2003. Retrieved from http://journalism.berkeley.edu/ngno/stories/001588.html on Apr. 9, 2006; “Rapper Is Sentenced To 120 Days in Jail”. New York Times . April 5, 1996;.

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Tupac Shakur’s Volatile Life, Delivered by Friendly Hands

Access to the late rapper’s journals gives Staci Robinson’s authorized biography a rare intimacy, without delving deeply into his music.

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Sheldon Pearce is the author of “Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur.” His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Pitchfork and on NPR.

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TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography, by Staci Robinson

Last month, after 27 years, a suspect was charged in the murder of Tupac Shakur. A firecracker and crusader as sharp as he was brusque, Tupac reached megastar status in 1996, when his fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” went five times platinum. Often hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was a magnet for controversy during his life, and became a martyr for hip-hop militance after his death.

Though anticipated by those familiar with the case, the arrest may provide long-awaited closure that aptly comes in conjunction with Staci Robinson’s poignant “Tupac Shakur.”

The Tupac story has been told many times over , but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac’s many journals and notebooks. Along with scores of interviews, the book is stuffed with photocopies of the rapper’s personal writings. As if tucked between the pages, these hand-scrawled poems, raps and musings provide windows into his mind.

For Robinson, this is a personal undertaking. She and Tupac were in the same high school social circle in Northern California, and over time she fielded calls to work on writing projects for him. With Shakur’s aunt she collaborated on “Tupac Remembered,” a 2008 collection of interviews, and was an executive producer on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” the 2023 docuseries about the rapper and his mother.

Robinson writes in an introduction that she took up the biography at Afeni’s request in 1999, but that the project was put “on hold” a few weeks after she submitted the manuscript. Called on decades later to complete the work, Robinson spends its pages advocating not only for Tupac’s integrity, but for the spirit of Black resistance he embodied.

“He wanted to relay stories that needed to be told,” she writes. “It was time to tell the truth about America’s history, about its dark past and especially about the oppression and disparities that were plaguing communities.”

“Tupac Shakur” is a touching, empathetic portrait of a friend. Even familiar stories achieve new intimacy at closer range. And small moments help clarify longstanding narratives, coloring in the outlines of this well-known tale of the actor-rapper-activist who died at 25. The book attempts to contextualize the sadness and paranoia beneath the charisma; throughout his life, we learn, “van Gogh would come to be a touchstone for Tupac.”

As in “Dear Mama,” Robinson’s biography sees the rapper’s legacy as inextricable from his mother’s, and the book begins not with Tupac, but with Afeni — her exposure to racism in the Jim Crow South, her arrest in New York as a member of the Black Panthers and her standing trial while pregnant.

Afeni, we are told, was the bedrock of Tupac’s moral mission. “Ingrained from birth and into his upbringing were both Afeni’s fears and her dreams for her son — the expectation that he would carry on her dedication to the Black community and the will to help others achieve freedom from oppression,” Robinson writes.

The book posits that Tupac inherited an antagonistic relationship with the police from the Shakurs — his mother, her first husband, Lumumba, and Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu. Yet it astutely chronicles his life as a microcosm of the ongoing Black American struggle. Robinson often draws direct parallels between Tupac’s creative life and his run-ins with law enforcement. She notes that he was assaulted by Oakland police officers only weeks after shooting the video for “Trapped,” a diatribe against police brutality; filming on the 1993 movie “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred, was put on pause during the L.A. riots.

Black cultural responses to injustice were early fuel for a sensitive, boisterous would-be artist. We hear of him furiously riding his tricycle around the apartment as Gil Scott-Heron plays on the turntable; he “entered a new realm” portraying 11-year-old Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at a Harlem fund-raiser for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

We get what feel like firsthand peeks into his turbulent rise to stardom, too; Robinson recounts how his mother would send Tupac traveling with care packages that included condoms, vitamins, prayer cloths and phone numbers for bail bondsmen.

Though there are frequent references to his prolific output, “Tupac Shakur” doesn’t focus much on music, which undersells him as an artistic genius. The book mostly considers his songs as ways to explain his behavior; it is not overly concerned with how they were made or whether they succeeded aesthetically. Lyrics either underscore a caring nature or are vehicles for public controversy.

In this way, the narrative plays into a longstanding Tupac binary — the sensitive revolutionary and the hair-trigger thug — though it insinuates the latter was primarily a construction of a sensationalist press. And while offering a valiant defense, Robinson excuses Tupac of many provocations. It spends very little time on his 1994 sexual-abuse conviction , and absolves the rapper in an earlier incident at an outdoor festival that left a 6-year-old boy dead, even though the gun in question was registered to him. It doesn’t even consider that he might be culpable, accidentally or by proxy.

Robinson does not stand at a historian’s distance. Her writing radiates admiration, and at times she even speaks on Tupac’s behalf. Even so, this is far from hagiography. At its best, the book feels like a plea to re-examine the world that made Tupac Shakur so angry.

TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography | By Staci Robinson | 406 pp. | Crown | $35

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Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography

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Staci Robinson

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

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  • Print length 448 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Crown
  • Publication date October 24, 2023
  • Dimensions 6.51 x 1.38 x 9.38 inches
  • ISBN-10 1524761044
  • ISBN-13 978-1524761042
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (October 24, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524761044
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524761042
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.68 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.51 x 1.38 x 9.38 inches
  • #12 in Rap Music (Books)
  • #13 in Rap & Hip-Hop Musician Biographies
  • #267 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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Dl: dante presents og vibe series, evil mind gangsta’s – all hell breakin’ loose [1992] [cd],  dl: ultimate death row video compilation (dvd) iso, 2pacalypse now notebook, tupac is finally honored with a star on the hollywood walk of fame, dl book: from friends to enemies as told by dexter isaac, dl: live squad – a game of survival (unreleased promo) 1993 – cassette tape rip, never-heard 2pac’s 1991 interview with michael small, 1996-06-29 / tupac interview in italy with paola zukar of “aelle rap magazine”, dl: 2pac video collection 3 dvd discs (iso) by deathrowrecords.com, 1995-09-10 / 2pac loves tronya, rare photo at clinton correctional facility, 1991-06-29 / 2pac and digital underground during the “budweiser superfest”, surprising facts about tupac shakur, ”nothing 2 lose” handwritten lyrics, 2pac’s influence on street art: a graffiti journey, tupac’s favorite hobbies, dr. mutulu shakur, tupac’s stepfather, dies at 72, tupac’s biological father billy garland opens up on how he felt after the ”dear mama” track, tupac and jada pinkett smith: the never-ending story, after 36 years behind bars: mutulu shakur speaks out for the first time since being released, dl: suge knight: on the real death row story (2001) (dvd), dl: if my homie calls (rnb & street mix) cassette tape prod. by greg beasley, dl: dj cochise – makaveli 2 the remix album – volume 8 (coc 522) (us) [flac], prince ital joe (1997) – prince ital joe (promo advance) (cassette tape) [256] download, the pacific archived server – the source of tupac’s unreleased music (264 files), 2pac – troublesome ’21 (unreleased album) cd, new nfts of tupac show rare pieces of his jewelry and final photo before death, dl: digital underground – raw uncut [dvd], rare interview reveals 2pac’s emotions behind the scenes of “poetic justice”, unseen tupac interview reveals why he decided to star in gridlock’d, a rare interview with tupac during the shooting of the movie “gang related” emerges, 2pac’s original studio reel-to-reel unreleased [august 05, 1994], 1996-06-19 / day 6 – ”one nation” project. the last pac’s day in l.a., tupac is holding a baby bottle. rare photo from baltimore, 1987, 1993-12-16 throwback: rare video when tupac accused the media of trying to bring his career down, how many songs does tupac have (updating…), left eye interview about tupac shakur, sister 2 sister magazine (1998), who tupac really was 50+ rare facts, what was tupac like in real life, the story of tupac’s godmother assata shakur and why she’s on the fbi’s most wanted list, who was biggie smalls aka big dric from 2pac’s ”god bless the dead”, candyman 187 talks about the havenotz group and the savior tupac, sekyiwa ‘set’ shakur – what it’s like to be tupac’s sister.

biography of 2pac shakur

Tupac Shakur Biography

biography of 2pac shakur

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.

Panther 21 acquittal, Afeni and a 1 or 2 month old baby Pac! July or August 1971.

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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.

Young Pac

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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.”

Mutulu, Mopreme & Family

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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 .

biography of 2pac shakur

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 ”.

biography of 2pac shakur

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.

2pac-2pacalypse-now

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 .

2Pac ‎– Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

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.

Thug Life Vol.1 Cover Front

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.

tupac-shot 94

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.

tupac out on bail limo

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.

2Pac ‎– All Eyez On Me

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.

makaveli_the_don_killuminati-front

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.

Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon Poster

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.

Flamingo Road - Koval Lane

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.

the last tupac picture

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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Tupac Shakur Biography

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

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Tupac Shakur Digital Bio

GOVERNMENT NAME: TUPAC AMARU SHAKUR

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

biography of 2pac shakur

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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Why Tupac Never Died

Tupac Shakur photographed shirtless wearing a chain and covered in soap bubbles.

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.

biography of 2pac shakur

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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The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth Goes On

By Jill Lepore

Scooter Braun and the Twilight of the Music Manager

By Andrew O’Hagan

Remembering William Whitworth’s Editorial Eye

By Ian Frazier

Andrew Scott Joins the Pantheon of Talented Mr. Ripleys

‘Tupac Shakur’ captures an icon’s spark and decades of Black history

Staci robinson’s authorized biography covers the rapper’s early life and private life as well as the years of global fame.

In the winter of 1971, Afeni Shakur, a 24-year-old Black revolutionary on trial in a case for which she had — against all advice — insisted on conducting her own defense, secured pen and paper and carefully wrote out a letter to “the unborn baby within my womb.” From her cell in downtown Manhattan, she wrote:

I’ve learned a lot in two years about being a woman and it’s for this reason that I want to talk to you. … I’ve discovered what I should have known a long time ago — that change has to begin within ourselves — whether there is a revolution today or tomorrow — we still must face the problem of purging ourselves of the larceny that we have all inherited. I hope we do not pass it on to you because you are our only hope. You must weigh our actions and decide for yourselves what was good and what was bad. It is obvious that somewhere we failed but I know it will not — it cannot end here.

It would not end there. Afeni gave a rousing speech before the court that moved the judge to release her from custody pending the verdict, which arrived 10 days later. All the defendants in the “Panther 21” case, as it was popularly known, were eventually cleared of the terrorism charges against them, as the prosecution’s largely circumstantial evidence failed to convince the jury.

The baby, a boy, was born on June 16, 1971. Afeni gave him two names. For the government to put on his birth certificate, she chose Lesane Parish Crooks, a combination of the names of women who were important in her life, including her sister’s family and the lesbian women she had befriended in jail. She had adopted for herself the nom de guerre Afeni, a Yoruba name meaning “Dear One” and “Lover of People.” She gave her son a revolutionary name as well, the name of the last leader of the Incan resistance against the Spanish conquistadors, a name she intended to evoke the spirit of all Indigenous peoples of the world in their struggle against all forms of colonial oppression: Tupac Amaru Shakur.

The iconic rap artist the world knows as Tupac Shakur (and by his stage name 2Pac, and often, affectionately, just Pac) was born, as Afeni prophesied, into the chaos of a collapsing revolutionary movement that had sought to reshape the cultural consciousness and the communitarian political will of Black America. The story of his brief and turbulent life is also an epilogue to that failed revolution: a symbol of the terrible costs that have accumulated, and continue to climb, as the legitimate aspirations that aroused that political fervor continue to be deferred, denied or simply abandoned.

By the time of his death in 1996, at 25, Tupac had made himself into one of the most admired and reviled, most beloved and hated, most envied and feared Black men in America. His body, his face and, above all, his voice broadcast the figure of the gangster rapper, a composite of underclass resistance and hedonistic rage. A global celebrity of the MTV era, he embodied stunning contradictions: sincere revolutionary anger and care for the oppressed, entrepreneurial amorality and aggression, and a flair for capturing the pop-cultural zeitgeist. He was the heir to Che Guevara, Frank Lucas and Michael Jackson all at once.

Tupac has been the subject of a biopic and numerous documentaries and books, including a collective biography released earlier this year, Santi Elijah Holley’s “ An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created .” The vines of myth have grown around him, producing a sprawling martyrology and a raft of conspiracy theories about the shooting in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996, that led to his death a week later. This September, 27 years after the fact, the Las Vegas Police Department announced that it had arrested Duane Keith Davis , who has long been suspected of involvement in the shooting along with his nephew Orlando Anderson (killed in a probably unrelated shootout in 1998). Given these decades now of rumor, gossip and lore, one might wonder if there is anything left to say about Tupac, or any way to get a reliable picture of a subject whose turbulent legacy is indelibly woven into the tremendous impact of his art.

It turns out there is. Staci Robinson’s “ Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography ” gets its authorization from none other than Tupac’s mother, who asked Robinson to chronicle her son’s life. Robinson is a screenwriter and novelist. She was also a high school friend of Tupac’s who has been on intimate terms with what she calls “Tupacland” since the early 1990s. A first draft of this biography was completed in 1999, when interviews and memories were still fresh, even raw. The project was sidelined, however, then revived in 2017, when Robinson became involved in the curation of a museum exhibit about Tupac’s life. Robinson is humble and even self-deprecating in her preface, explaining that she often felt inadequate as a writer, given the monumental task at hand. But she persisted because of a sense of duty and the faith that Afeni Shakur placed in her.

The greatest risk of such a book is always hagiography; proximity to a subject and their family and friends can easily become detrimental to honest assessment. While reading, I braced myself whenever the narrative approached one of the highly charged, well-publicized episodes in Tupac’s life. There’s the shooting of Qa’id Walker-Teal, a 6-year-old boy who was killed by a stray bullet in 1992 when a brawl broke out between Tupac’s entourage and gang members in Marin City, Calif., who felt the rapper had disrespected them. There’s the shooting at Quad Studios in New York, where, during a robbery in 1994, Tupac was shot five times, an incident he forever believed was a setup that involved Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.; the shooting led to a poisonous rivalry that engulfed the entire rap scene and that many have blamed for both rappers’ murders. There are the 1993 sexual assault allegations by 19-year-old Ayanna Jackson, regarding events in a hotel room with Tupac and several of his associates; Tupac was acquitted of the most serious charges but was sentenced to 4½ years in prison for first-degree sexual abuse, characterized in the verdict as “forcibly touching the buttocks,” for which he ultimately served 11 months. Then, of course, there’s the fateful night in Las Vegas when, just after the Bruce Seldon-Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand (Tupac had composed Tyson’s entrance music), Tupac and his entourage beat up Orlando Anderson, on the grounds that Anderson had robbed someone in Tupac’s entourage of their specially crafted Death Row Records chain. (The irony of the contentious object is unavoidable.)

Robinson gives each of these events its fair share of attention and treats them with a relatively, though not entirely, unbiased eye. She never veers into outright apology or mitigates or conceals troubling details. Unless one is an insider to these events, of course, it can be hard to tell how much a biographer is strategically withholding or emphasizing.

The one person I wish we learned more about in the book is Keisha Morris, who was studying criminal justice when Tupac met her in 1994. They were married in 1995 at the Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, N.Y., when Tupac was incarcerated there. While their relationship was brief (they divorced before his death), some of the book’s most tender moments center on the downtime Robinson describes the couple sharing in Keisha’s Harlem apartment: Tupac scribbling lyrics on notepads while the cocker spaniel that he bought to keep her company nips at his toes; cooking for each other; Tupac insisting on taking Keisha to see his favorite show on Broadway, “Les Misérables.”

Robinson perfectly captures these everyday moments. Strangely, on balance, you almost feel like you’re reading about the life of an ordinary person. This impression is reinforced by the inclusion of facsimile pages from Tupac’s school notebooks, which range from his favorite Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (which he would occasionally recite from memory throughout his life), to the delightfully adolescent poem “4 Jada,” about his crush on Jada Pinkett (now Jada Pinkett Smith), his classmate at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Robinson weights the book toward the rapper’s early years, a welcome decision that lets us see the complex layers of his private life, which was eventually eclipsed by his celebrity, the sensationalism of his swaggering persona and the shock waves of his violent death.

Tupac’s youth was shaped by his mother’s efforts to put her life back together and provide security, stability and education for her family. Afeni had joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and quickly married Lumumba Shakur, the minister of defense for the Harlem chapter of the Panthers. The relationship, strained by Afeni’s trial, ultimately ended in divorce. She became close with Billy Garland, a Panther from Jersey City who was supporting the members on trial, and Kenneth “Legs” Saunders, “a lieutenant of the famed drug lord Nicky Barnes.” Afeni had relationships with both men, and when Tupac was born it was not immediately clear that Garland was his biological father. After gaining her freedom, Afeni continued her political activism and worked on drug prevention programs in New York, where she crossed paths with Mutulu Shakur, another young revolutionary, who had also taken that surname to indicate his dedication to the Black freedom struggle. Mutulu was a foundational member of the Republic of New Afrika, which had drafted plans to create a separatist state for Black people by forcing the U.S. government to “free the land” between Louisiana and South Carolina. When Tupac was 4, Afeni gave birth to a daughter with Mutulu, Sekyiwa Shakur. The family moved through several homes in Harlem and the Bronx, and spent significant time living with Afeni’s sister Jean and her partner Thomas “T.C.” Cox, who worked for the New York Transit Authority.

All of this meant Tupac grew up with conflicting models of masculinity and fatherhood. Mutulu taught him about politics, imparting lessons about colonialism, imperialism and America’s “capitalistic power structure.” He was also a “healer and an acupuncturist,” who made all the children in the household do stretches in the morning, instilling in Tupac a lifelong devotion to physical fitness. T.C., a hard-working man with a steady job, offered an example of stability and an ethic of generosity and kinship beyond blood relation. Legs was a hustler and streetwise man who claimed Tupac as his son and bought him as an early gift a boombox with cassette players and extra-large woofers. Legs, too, was keen on health and nutrition, and we learn that the Shakur children would listen “with rapt attention as he offered detailed explanations of the benefits of cod liver oil and the positive effects of bee pollen.” He also would sometimes disappear without warning, and he died in 1985 of a heart attack. He fell prey to a scourge that would deeply mark Tupac’s life: the massive influx into Black neighborhoods of freebase crack cocaine, a side effect of President Ronald Reagan’s covert foreign policy moves in Central America and the Caribbean.

In the interstices of this tangle of poverty, instability and radical Afrocentric politics, one glimpses little moments that portend something no one could have foreseen. We see preteen Tupac in deep focus on his karate moves at the Black Cipher Academy, a dojo in Harlem run by a former Panther with “posters of Malcolm X and Che Guevara” lining the walls, where “Tupac always took out the garbage and wiped down the mirrors” in “exchange for the class fee, which Afeni couldn’t afford.” We see Mutulu teaching an 11-year-old Tupac “about the intricacies of haiku.” Tupac was “fascinated by its 5-7-5 meter and started to craft his own poems,” Robinson writes, dedicating them to the heroes in his life, the incarcerated Black revolutionaries he prayed would one day be free. We see him playing Bob Marley’s “Exodus” over and over on his special boombox. And we see this passion for music and poetry complemented by a magnetic stage presence in 1984, when Tupac, 13, performed the role of Travis Willard Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

Just as Tupac was beginning to flourish, his mother was slipping into an addiction to freebase cocaine, which Legs had introduced into her life. In the fall of 1984, Afeni and the children moved to the Baltimore neighborhood of Pen Lucy, one of the city’s “notorious drug zones.” Unlike megastar rappers such as Kanye West and Drake, who strike the street-tough pose but grew up solidly middle class, Tupac knew real poverty and deprivation in his youth. His makeshift bedroom had been converted from a patio. On the thin plywood walls with no insulation, he hung posters of his idols, including LL Cool J, Bruce Lee, Sheila E. and New Edition. Rats regularly raided the kitchen, and the family survived on food stamps. Tupac had secondhand pants that didn’t fit: “He quickly hemmed them with staples before he left for school.” Despite these hardships, life in Baltimore was a period of discovery for him. When the electricity would get cut off because of an unpaid bill, he later recalled, “I used to sit outside by the streetlights and read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’”

Tupac adopted the name Casanova Kid, then quickly dropped that in favor of MC New York after he teamed up with a sidekick named Mouse, an expert beatboxer. Together they wrote rhymes on the city bus and entered rap and poetry competitions. The first prize Tupac ever won was for a rap called “Us Killing Us Equals Genocide.” His second significant song was “Library Rap,” a lyric in praise of reading and knowledge. At the Baltimore School for the Arts, he flourished as a rowdy art and theater kid who was finally among his own. He made friends with Mary Baldridge, a dancer and the daughter of the director of the Communist Party of Maryland; Tupac had his first brush with formal politics during the 1987 Baltimore mayoral race, when he and Mary campaigned for Kurt Schmoke, who would become the city’s first elected Black mayor. Tupac’s tastes continued to broaden. He became enthralled by Don McLean’s song “Vincent” from the album “American Pie,” which developed into an enduring interest in the life and paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

But poverty and addiction would force another move, this time to Marin City, a Black ghetto in the otherwise wealthy Marin County headlands north of San Francisco. The streets of Marin were awash in drugs, and the artsy Tupac, who walked around with a rhyme book and a CD of the “Les Misérables” soundtrack in his back pocket, stuck out at Tamalpais High School. “He’d wear the same thing every day, jeans and a jean jacket, and he had a Gumby haircut back then,” a friend from Tamalpais later recalled.

Tupac drifted away from school; he dropped out in 1989 but found community in a multicultural youth support group led by Leila Steinberg, a Bay Area activist. Steinberg immediately sensed his exceptional qualities: “Tupac showed off his wide-ranging interests, reciting a passage from ‘Moby-Dick’ or adapting lines of ‘Macbeth’ before quickly switching genres to offer his opinion of Iceberg Slim’s memoir, ‘Pimp.’” Robinson gives us a portrait of the artist as a young man, a restless spirit convinced of the greatness of his destiny, if unsure of his destination. At the crossroads, we overhear the contradictions of Tupac the aspiring star but also those of his time and place, California at the start of the 1990s. “ All I want in my life is to have a record out and be in a movie. That’s all I want. And if I can’t do that, I’m going to be president of the New Afrikan Panthers,” Tupac told an interviewer.

The rest of the life unfolds as if the Fates, or perhaps the Furies, are listening. On Aug. 15, 1991, Tupac became the first rap artist ever signed to Interscope Records. His recording career would last barely five years — long enough for him to achieve global stardom. He released four studio albums, starred or had a leading role in four films, and caroused with celebrities like Madonna, Mickey Rourke and Janet Jackson. On April 1, 1995, he became the first musician to hit No. 1 on Billboard while incarcerated, when his third album, “Me Against the World,” debuted at the top spot. Hundreds of thousands, then millions of dollars rolled in. Houses with pools, flashy cars, drives from the movie studio lot to the hood: The Tupac tornado was unleashed, and everywhere he touched down, flashes of lightning punctuated the storm.

In an age of spectacle, Tupac understood the power of projection, of fantasy, the deep craving in the American psyche for the outlaw who comes riding out of the West with a nihilistic taste for freedom. To be a young Black man in the age of Tupac was to be very afraid and very excited about a cliff top of power, one tantalizingly within reach, that you surmounted only by courting the abyss, the near-certainty of violent annihilation. Yet there he was: wrathful and proud like a wronged Monte Cristo, making it clear with a single look that A Nation of Millions Could Not Hold Him Back. Our poète maudit , aloof and gorgeous, sly and playful, rude and lewd, a gothic avenger, caroming through courtrooms, being everything we were told to be — and not to be. A hypermasculine sex symbol who had an image of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, “a symbol of feminine power and beauty,” inscribed on his chest, and who, on “Keep Ya Head Up,” affirmed in his lyrics a woman’s right to choose: “And since a man can’t make one/ He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one.” Here, too, was the sensitive poet whose midsection sported his most notorious tattoo, “the words ‘THUG LIFE’ inked in three-inch-high block letters” — the key letter, the I, an image of a lead bullet pointing upward to the head. The highlight reel spins faster and faster, and then, in a flash, he is gone.

Part of the Tupac legend is the eerie certainty of his premature death. On the set of the film “Juice,” a producer, Neal Moritz, “congratulated him for his performance and teased him about spending so much of his money on gold chains and rings.” Tupac simply quoted Robert Frost: “So dawn goes down to day/ Nothing gold can stay.” Moritz, undoubtedly flustered, insisted that Tupac was “going to be a big star in ten years.” (In truth he already was one.) “I’m not going to be alive,” Tupac responded. One could point to half a dozen songs in his catalogue that foreshadow his imminent demise. In any other artist, such an intensely morbid preoccupation could easily stifle our willingness to listen. In Tupac’s work, though, there’s a persistent feeling that he’s never talking about just himself, that he’s the conduit for an immense volume of shearing pain, the cry of a people living under the heel of oppression but also destroying each other in a terrifying, deadly spiral. It is an instantly unforgettable voice: warm and sinewy, fearless but troubled, archangelic. His delivery — breathy, heaving and bluesy, with his famously stretched vowels that accordion their way across the beat — gives his flow an almost overbearing force that sometimes gets squeezed into a syllabic Gatling gun and sometimes gushes like an open hydrant.

Certain artists seem to have, or perhaps borrow for a time, an epic voice, a voice in which a people recognize themselves. Umm Kulthum was an epic voice in the Arab world; Héctor Lavoe was such a voice for Puerto Ricans. Hip-hop has produced a dazzling array of memorable and exquisite voices. But go and listen to “Better Dayz,” or “Starin’ Through My Rear View,” or “Never Had a Friend Like Me,” or “Pain,” or “So Many Tears,” or “Lord Knows,” or “Dear Mama,” and it’s like 40 years of Black American history pours into the ear, and for those who can be touched, it goes to the heart — and hurts. There is no other hip-hop artist of whom I hear it so often said, and by all kinds of people, from all walks of life, that their music helped listeners “get through something.” To read Robinson’s magnificent biography, to follow the jagged spark of Tupac’s life through her pages, is to see how one human being could end up becoming the cause of so much emotion and, at times, a balm for it.

There is a powerful and often recycled notion that the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed should discover a right way — a righteous path to resist and overcome their condition. From the beginning, the criticism of Tupac (and of hip-hop more generally) was that he shouldn’t be emulated, that his music, his expression, his style and his vulgarity were dangerous, self-defeating, tragically misguided, the wrong way . That critique has always depended on neglecting the question of accountability for the conditions of the society into which he was born. Tupac chose to place his art and his brief life in the name of, and in the service of, the people traveling along the wrong way, the people our society most despises and discards. What do we call someone who offers themselves in that way, who wills their fate down that path? One place to look for an answer is in the pointed irony in one of Tupac’s most celebrated records, “Changes.” That song describes a society that has arrived at an aporia, a state of changelessness and hopelessness, an ugly time when history and the social order can’t and won’t budge, when cycles of destruction self-perpetuate. Tupac makes this diagnosis and calls on us to change it anyway:

We gotta make a change It’s time for us as a people to start makin’ some changes Let’s change the way we eat Let’s change the way we live And let’s change the way we treat each other

The conviction is unmistakable: It cannot end here. The demand is no less righteous whether we fail in our attempt or whether the messenger will not live to see our works. We know he is speaking truth. It is on us to make the changes that everyone on this planet needs; to bring an end, as Tupac said, to the “war on the streets and the war in the Middle East.”

Jesse McCarthy is an assistant professor in the departments of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the author of “The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War,” the essay collection “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” and a novel, “The Fugitivities.”

Tupac Shakur

The Authorized Biography

By Staci Robinson

Crown. 426 pp. $35

An earlier version of this review incorrectly described Kurt Schmoke as the first Black mayor of Baltimore. While Schmoke was the first elected Black mayor of Baltimore, the first Black mayor of the city was Clarence H. "Du" Burns, who was elevated into the role in 1987 after then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer was elected governor of Maryland. The text of the review has been corrected.

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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.”

The  Big Daddy Kane: Chocolate City  tour was scheduled to roll through more than twenty cities in two months. Kane, with his catchy rhymes and sharp fashion, had become a breakout star with his albums  Long Live the Kane  and  It’s a Big Daddy Thing . Along with Digital Underground, his supporting acts on the tour included Queen Latifah, who had just scored her debut hit single, “Ladies First”; rapper MC Lyte; and 3rd Bass. Eric B. & Rakim and De La Soul would also join the lineup in cities along the way, as would an up-and-coming artist named Jay-Z.

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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 Digital Underground set was not your average hip-hop show. The group rapped and they danced, but it was the props and theatrical antics that made them one of the most memorable musical acts of the ’90s. Shock G was the quintessential front man, seamlessly moving in and out of character as his alter ego, Humpty Hump, and hyping up the crowd with water guns and blow-up sex dolls until the audience was in a frenzy. Tupac dove in, headfirst, ready to be part of it all.

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.

After a few warnings, and another night of Tupac stepping on someone else’s verse, Shock had had enough. He fired Tupac. “You’re not a singer, Pac,” he explained.

“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!”

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.”

AS DIGITAL UNDERGROUND’S “Humpty Dance” hit number 1 on  Billboard ’s rap singles chart, the group’s stock increased and opportunities abounded. One of these opportunities was an invitation to go back on the road, this time with some of Tupac’s biggest hip-hop heroes — the politically charged rap group Public Enemy, led by Flavor Flav and Chuck D. Just two years before, Tupac had skipped school and rushed to meet Flavor Flav at the local radio station, just hoping to get a photo; now he was part of a lineup that would travel across the country with Public Enemy as they promoted their new album  Fear of a Black Planet.  Heavy D, Ice Cube, and Queen Latifah would also join parts of the tour.

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.”

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”:

Felt so alone

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.”

Staring the officer in the eye, he asked loudly, “Do you know who you’re talking to? That’s Queen Latifah. Fuck that! Nobody can talk to Queen Latifah like that!” A potentially explosive situation was only defused by a last-minute intervention by Shock, who came upon the scene, practically picked up an irate Tupac, and set him aside to try to get him to calm down.

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.

As much as Tupac detested security guards and police officers, he was not above doing some policing himself, taking matters into his own hands if those he cared for were wronged. In Oklahoma City, news traveled backstage that someone had entered Public Enemy’s dressing room and stolen Chuck D’s signature black leather jacket. Tupac was infuriated, another holdover response from Afeni’s lessons about lying and stealing. He combed the place looking for the culprit. “I think I know who did it. I’m gonna find out who did it,” Tupac promised Chuck D.

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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 murder: The untold story of why it took nearly 3 decades to make an arrest

ABC News investigates how the cold case finally turned hot.

It appeared that the unsolved murder of rap star Tupac Shakur could not have been more cold.

Nearly three decades ticked by with no arrests despite multiple public statements by a self-confessed Los Angeles gangbanger, and repeated comments that the police knew who was behind the 1996 drive-by off the Las Vegas Strip.

Behind the scenes, authorities in Sin City were working quietly and steadily, pushing forward.

PHOTO: In this March, 1994, file photo, rapper Tupac Shakur poses for photos backstage after his performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago.

"We left no stone unturned," Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, who leads the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, told ABC News in his first extended comments on the case. "Tupac is one of those people that sort of transcends his own death… he and his family deserve a police department that goes after justice."

In July 2023, the cold case of Shakur's killing turned hot when police raided a Vegas-area home . Then, on a sunny September morning in Henderson, Nevada, McMahill's officers made an arrest.

Since Vegas police searched that home and arrested Duane "Keffe D" Davis, ABC News has been investigating the probe and whether the killing could have been solved earlier. This is the story of what transpired when hip-hop and the violence of dueling street gangs collided with police departments in both Vegas and Los Angeles, and their competing efforts to solve the twin shootings of Shakur and fellow rap icon Biggie Smalls.

On Sept. 29, 2023, Davis was charged with murder and authorities alleged that, though he did not fire the gun that killed Shakur, Davis was the "shot caller" and riding with the assailant. Sitting in the back of a police car, Davis, an admitted member of the South Side Crips, told the cop driving him he knew exactly why he had been busted: "the biggest case in Las Vegas History."

Davis has pleaded not guilty and is currently held in the Clark County jail in Vegas. His trial is set to begin Nov. 4.

Davis' attorney Carl Arnold points to what he says seems a dearth of concrete evidence in the case – and that Davis was no "shot caller."

"Basically their whole case right now, from what I've seen, is just Keffe's statements," Arnold said. "If that evidence is all it is, we can walk into trial today. We're walking back out. Not guilty."

Fourteen years ago, police and prosecutors in Las Vegas had been on the verge of arresting Davis for the Shakur killing, officials told ABC.

Davis sat down with Las Vegas detectives in 2009 to tell his version of events, and according to police complete with his role in the homicide – a story he would go on to recount over and over, including on the pages of the memoir he would publish in 2019.

On Sept. 7, 1996, the night Shakur was shot, it seemed as though the entire world had descended on Vegas to see Mike Tyson fight Bruce Seldon. Shakur was there, along with rap impresario Marion "Suge" Knight, a founder of the famed Death Row Records. Each was trailed by their entourages. Davis and his crew were also in town.

PHOTO: Sheriff Kevin McMahill in his first extended interview on the Tupac homicide investigation tells ABC News his team left 'no stone unturned' in their investigation.

After the fight, in the lobby of the MGM Grand, Shakur and Knight encountered Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson – Davis' nephew, and a reputed young Crips member. Shakur was told Anderson had been involved in trying to steal a Death Row Records pendant months earlier – a major infraction in the hip-hop world. Shakur and Knight were moved to confront Anderson.

That now-infamous beatdown sparked a chain reaction that would lead to Shakur's death, prosecutors allege. It also, according to Davis' account, gave him and his crew the "ultimate green light" to seek out "the dudes that beat up" Anderson, and particularly, Knight.

MORE: Tupac Shakur timeline: Key events in rapper's murder investigation

Riding in the front passenger seat of a Cadillac that night, Davis said they ultimately found Shakur and Knight driving in a BMW near the Las Vegas Strip. Anderson and another man were in the backseat of the Cadillac with Davis.

PHOTO: Retired Los Angeles Police Department detective Greg Kading is shown. He first interviewed the man now accused of being the "shot caller" in the rapper's killing in 2008.

"We at the light on Las Vegas and Flamingo," Davis told police in 2009, in what Las Vegas police say was a "surreptitiously" recorded interview. A copy of the recording was obtained by ABC News. "He, Suge, ah, Tupac hanging out the window," with "all the girls was going crazy on the corner."

"What happened when you pulled up alongside?" a detective asked Davis.

The answer: "Got to shooting."

Davis explained he maneuvered the gun toward the backseat when his nephew grabbed it.

"Orlando said, 'Give it here, I'll shoot,'" Davis said. "And he got to shooting."

PHOTO: In this Nov. 2, 2023, file photo, Duane Davis appears in Clark County District Court to plead not guilty at an arraignment at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas.

Knight was injured. Shakur was hospitalized and died six days later.

Police now point to both Davis' 2009 interview and a series of similar media statements as clear admissions and key evidence.

"We believe he's the shot caller, and we believe he provided the weapon," McMahill told ABC News.

"We never forgot about this case," said Las Vegas Police Lt. Jason Johansson, who leads the homicide bureau. "If anything, this shows we never forgot about it."

Investigators and prosecutors in Vegas seriously considered arresting Davis after he made the 2009 statement, authorities told ABC News. But they decided that, with only Davis' words in the one police interview, there wasn't enough evidence to proceed. Instead, they continued working the case, trying to untangle the various conspiracy theories and attempting to build a prosecution.

What had not been previously revealed is the strange series of events connected with both the 2009 confession and an earlier one in 2008 that led to a heated dispute between LA and Vegas police.

Officials said Davis confessed to his role in the Shakur homicide in 2008 to detectives on a joint federal-LA task force. That time, according to police, Davis made his admissions as part of what's known as a "proffer agreement," so what he told investigators could not be used against him in court.There was concern among Vegas authorities then, in 2009, that Davis would argue in court that both sets of alleged confessions were inadmissible because the proffer gave him immunity even though Las Vegas police had no role in making the agreement. And, if a judge were to side with Davis, they figured, that would likely have doomed any prosecution.

PHOTO: Las Vegas Police Lt. Jason Johansson, who leads the homicide bureau, tells ABC News in an interview that investigators "never forgot about this case."

"After they became aware of our proffer session, they came out and conducted their own interview," retired LAPD Det. Greg Kading, who was leading the investigation in California, said of his Vegas counterparts. "But because it's a law enforcement interview, it has to still fall under the purview of the proffer."

Bottom line, Kading said, "They were hamstrung."

What occurred with those alleged confessions continues to be a source of friction to this day.

"I just don't believe a lot of the information that was being conducted there in LA was actually being shared with us," McMahill said. There was "a level of frustration on the part of my detectives in being able to actually move forward."

McMahill explained "our bad guys and their bad guys, they go up and down Interstate 15 and they commit crimes here and go back to LA and vice versa. So we've always had a really good relationship with and sharing intelligence. But in this particular case, that was less than optimal, for certain. And I'm not exactly sure why."

Kading said he and his team had reason to withhold information.

"If we were to do it all again, I would do it the exact same way," Kading said in an interview. "When Keffe D agreed to be an informant, we're going to utilize him as an investigative tool. We need to keep that as confidential as possible."

The dispute in 2009 between LA police and Vegas became so testy that it nearly came to blows at one point, officials told ABC News. Kading said he does not recall that.

In a statement to ABC News, LAPD said its "equally concerned about Sheriff McMahill's claim from 2008 and 2009."

"The department has not received information about this claim and any recent inquiries regarding this case have been accommodated," LAPD's statement continued. "The Chief of Detectives for the LAPD is actively seeking a meeting with personnel from Las Vegas Metro to determine the specifics of what transpired during this investigation, at that time, between our respective organizations. Although the personnel involved in this case in 2008 and 2009 are no longer with the department, we will investigate to better understand if information was withheld. The LAPD and Las Vegas Metro have a robust relationship, resulting in solving numerous crimes in both jurisdictions and look forward to continuing this relationship."

MORE: Authorities investigating Tupac Shakur murder suspect Duane Davis' jailhouse calls: Officials

In March 1997, six months after Shakur was gunned down, Biggie Smalls was killed in an LA drive-by, in what many both in law enforcement and in the rap world believe was revenge for Shakur's shooting. Shakur and Knight were allegedly connected to the Bloods street gang, authorities have said; on the other side, Biggie and Sean "Diddy" Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, which authorities say, often hired the rivaling Crips as security – of which Davis was an admitted leader.

It was, in fact, that unsolved killing of Biggie Smalls that Kading's task force were investigating when they first spoke with Davis.

"We go into questions about Biggie Smalls' murder," Kading explained. "And his response was like, 'I can't really tell you anything about that. We didn't do that. But I can tell you about another one.' We begin to understand that maybe he's involved in the Tupac Shakur murder."

In the years since, Las Vegas police said they continued to pursue Davis – and an eventual arrest.

Davis, it turns out, would help police build their case more than he realized.

PHOTO: In his first extended interview, Duane "Keffe D" Davis' attorney Carl Arnold tells ABC News he hasn't seen sufficient concrete evidence to convict his client.

In 2018, Davis did an interview for the docuseries "Death Row Chronicles." A year later, he published his own memoir. By making those comments, police and prosecutors say, he no longer was protected from prosecution.

"That reinvigorates the investigation," Johansson said. "More and more people began to provide us with a better description of their recollection of that night."

Arnold, representing Davis, said his client was simply spinning tales for a payday.

"All these interviews that he's done, all of these stories are inconsistent," Carl Arnold, representing Davis, told ABC News. "He did it for profit, No. 1. And, you know, notoriety."

ABC News' Alex Stone contributed to this report.

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Dear Mama (2022)

A documentary series which follows the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur and his mother, the Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur. A documentary series which follows the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur and his mother, the Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur. A documentary series which follows the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur and his mother, the Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur.

  • 16 User reviews
  • 7 Critic reviews
  • 3 wins & 11 nominations total

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Tupac: Resurrection

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User reviews 16

  • patrickbond-23974
  • Oct 6, 2023
  • How many seasons does Dear Mama have? Powered by Alexa
  • April 21, 2023 (United States)
  • United States
  • Untitled Tupac Shakur Documentary
  • A Defiant Ones Media Group Production
  • An Amaru Entertainment Production
  • DreamCrew Entertainment
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro

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  • Runtime 1 hour 5 minutes
  • Black and White

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biography of 2pac shakur

Eminem wrote a heartwarming letter to Tupac's mother thanking her for the immense support

Some people never forget where they came from, even after reaching greater heights. How one remembers and respects their humble beginnings says a lot about them. While celebrities are known to change their personalities once fame hits , some choose an unpretentious life. World-renowned rap artist Eminem is one of them and his letter to rapper Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, shows us why. The  emotional letter  was included in the "California Love" rapper's biography, "Tupac Remembered" and also showed up on an exhibit at the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia, as per  Rolling Stone . 

Recently, the letter has been making its rounds on  social media  and people are more surprised about the drawing of Tupac that the "Without Me" singer sketched himself. The drawing attached to the emotional letter was Eminem's way of expressing his gratitude for Shakur, a political activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. He began the letter by apologizing for his "sloppy" sketch of Tupac, which he thought could've been better if he had the right pencils. The rapper had been drawing since he was 10 and wanted to put his skills to work to show his love for his rap idol. 

"Thank you for always being so kind to me. You are a true Queen and I mean that in every sense of the word," read the letter. The "My Name Is" rapper thanked Shakur for the opportunities she had given him during his early days as a rap artist. "You will always be in my heart, my thoughts and my prayers," wrote Eminem. He then wrote about his love for the "Dear Mama" singer and mentioned, "You have no idea how much your son and his music has inspired, not only the 'Hip Hop' world but speaking for myself, has inspired my whole career." According to Eminem, Tupac was the "true definition of 'Soldier.'"

People share 10 peculiar things that are pretty normal for women but are mind-boggling for men

The rapper poured out his heart about how Tupac's music had unknowingly influenced his outlook on the world. "When I was feeling at my worst (before fame, before Dre), I knew I could put that 'Tupac' tape in and suddenly, things weren't so bad," wrote the "Stan" rapper and added that Tupac gave him the courage to stand up for himself against a world that is always critical. Eminem attributed Tupac's song to making him care the least if people like him or not. "Thank you for giving us his spirit and yours! God bless you!" read the letter. The rapper signed both the letter and his sketch of Tupac by his original name, "Marshall." He wanted Shakur to know that she always had a friend in him. 

This undated letter caught the internet's eyes and people could not help but gush over the "Love The Way You Lie" rapper's surprisingly beautiful drawing and handwriting skills. When u/sakekaasu shared it on Reddit recently, it garnered over 34K upvotes. u/AlphaNoodlz wrote, "Handwriting and hand-sketching, frankly, I'm super impressed. I mean I'm impressed by him as a musician, and in general, I admire his resilience, but as an amazing artist, I guess him being able to draw really well shouldn't surprise me." u/throwevrythingaway lauded the rapper saying, "The fact that he signed it Marshall means he's just writing from the heart. For someone so talented and a GOAT in his own right, he never fails to show respect."

Eminem wrote a heartwarming letter to Tupac's mother thanking her for the immense support

IMAGES

  1. Tupac Shakur

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  2. Tupac Shakur Biography

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  3. Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography Official Cover, Release Date

    biography of 2pac shakur

  4. Tupac Amaru Shakur Biography

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  5. Tupac "2Pac" Shakur

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  6. Tupac Shakur Biography, Age, Height, Weight, Wiki, Net Worth, Facts & More

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VIDEO

  1. Biography Tupac Shakur

  2. Biography stories Tupac Shakur EP 7 / DJTV

  3. King of Rap Tupac Shakur: The Untold Story of a Hip-Hop Icon & Tragic End

  4. Who Killed Tupac Shakur? (2023) FULL TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY w/ SUBS

  5. Keefe D (Tupac Shakur Killer) Biography, Lifestyle and Net Worth 2023

  6. Tupac

COMMENTS

  1. Tupac Shakur: Biography, Rapper, Actor

    1971-1996 Latest News: Man Charged with the Murder of Tupac Shakur. Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former member of the Crips street gang, was arrested and indicted on one count of murder on ...

  2. Tupac Shakur

    Tupac Amaru Shakur (/ ˈ t uː p ɑː k ʃ ə ˈ k ʊər / TOO-pahk shə-KOOR; born Lesane Parish Crooks; June 16, 1971 - September 13, 1996), also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper.Considered one of the most influential and successful rappers of all time, he is among the best-selling music artists, having sold more than 75 million records worldwide.

  3. Tupac Shakur

    Tupac Shakur (born June 16, 1971, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died September 13, 1996, Las Vegas, Nevada) 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 ...

  4. Tupac Shakur

    Tupac Shakur. Actor: Juice. Born in New York City, Tupac grew up primarily in Harlem. In 1984, his family moved to Baltimore, Maryland where he became good friends with Jada Pinkett Smith. His family moved again in 1988 to Oakland, California. His first breakthrough in music came in 1991 as a member of the group Digital Underground. In the same year he received individual recognition for his ...

  5. Bio

    Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated and prolific figures in modern history. Shakur's message has continued to resonate throughout the world as ...

  6. Tupac Shakur (1971-1996)

    Tupac Shakur, the son of two Black Panther members, William Garland and Afeni Shakur, was born in East Harlem, New York on June 16, 1971, and named after Jose Gabriel Tupac Amaru II, an 18th century political leader in Peru who was executed after leading a rebellion against Spanish rule. Tupac's parents separated before he was born.

  7. Tupac Amaru Shakur Biography

    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.

  8. Book Review: 'Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,' by Staci

    The Tupac story has been told many times over, but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac's many ...

  9. Tupac Shakur

    Tupac Shakur. Actor: Juice. Born in New York City, Tupac grew up primarily in Harlem. In 1984, his family moved to Baltimore, Maryland where he became good friends with Jada Pinkett Smith. His family moved again in 1988 to Oakland, California. His first breakthrough in music came in 1991 as a member of the group Digital Underground. In the same year he received individual recognition for his ...

  10. Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography

    The authorized biography of the legendary artist, Tupac Shakur, a "touching, empathetic portrait" (The New York Times) of his life and powerful legacy, fully illustrated with photos, mementos, handwritten poetry, musings, and more Artist, poet, actor, revolutionary, legend Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists ...

  11. Tupac Shakur Biography

    Tupac Amaru Shakur was an American rapper. In addition to his status as a top-selling recording artist, Shakur was a successful film actor and a prominent social activist. He is recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-selling rap artist, with over 75,000,000 albums sold worldwide, including over 50,000,000 in the United […]

  12. Tupac Shakur Biography

    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 ...

  13. Why Tupac Never Died

    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 ...

  14. Murder of Tupac Shakur

    Murder of Tupac Shakur. On September 7, 1996, at 11:15 p.m. ( PDT ), Tupac Shakur, a 25-year old American rapper, was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. The shooting occurred when the car carrying Shakur was stopped at a red light at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. [2]

  15. 'Tupac Shakur' is an authorized bio that captures the rapper's spark

    Staci Robinson's " Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography " gets its authorization from none other than Tupac's mother, who asked Robinson to chronicle her son's life. Robinson is a ...

  16. 'Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography' Excerpt On Digital Underground

    The Moment It Was Clear Tupac Would be a Star. An excerpt from the new 'Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography' tells the story of the rapper's early days in Digital Underground. Rappers Humpty ...

  17. Tupac Shakur discography

    Tupac Shakur discography. The discography of American rapper Tupac Shakur consists of 11 studio albums. Throughout his career and posthumously, Shakur sold more than 75 million records worldwide. [1] He has scored 5 No. 1 albums on Billboard 200 and 8 No. 1 albums on Top R&B/Hip-Hop albums. [2] In 2001, Guinness World Records hailed him as the ...

  18. Review: 'Tupac Shakur' biography offers limited portrait ...

    Late last month, the Los Angeles Police Department indicted Duane Keith Davis in the murder of Tupac Shakur. His arrest, the first involving Shakur's long-unsolved death, comes some 27 years after a white Cadillac pulled up next to the rapper and actor at a Las Vegas stoplight and sent four bullets into his body, ultimately killing him at the age of 25.

  19. New Tupac Shakur Biography Details Making of Juice

    October 24, 2023 2:09pm. 'Juice,' from left: Omar Epps, Tupac Shakur, 1992. Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection. In early 1991, 20-year-old Tupac Shakur was torn between ambitions of acting and ...

  20. Tupac Shakur murder: The untold story of why it took nearly 3 decades

    In July 2023, the cold case of Shakur's killing turned hot when police raided a Vegas-area home. Then, on a sunny September morning in Henderson, Nevada, McMahill's officers made an arrest. Since ...

  21. Dear Mama (TV Mini Series 2022- )

    Dear Mama: With Mike Tyson, Gloria Cox, Snoop Dogg, Jamal Joseph. A documentary series which follows the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur and his mother, the Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur.

  22. Afeni Shakur

    Afeni Shakur Davis (born Alice Faye Williams; January 10, 1947 - May 2, 2016) was an American political activist and member of the Black Panther Party. Shakur was the mother of rapper Tupac Shakur and the executor of his estate. She founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and also served as the CEO of Amaru Entertainment, Inc., a record and film production company she founded.

  23. Tupac Shakur

    Tupac Amaru Shakur, również 2Pac i Makaveli (ur. 16 czerwca 1971 w Nowym Jorku [1] jako Lesane Parish Crooks, zm. 13 września 1996 w Las Vegas [2]) - amerykański raper, poeta, aktor i aktywista społeczny. W oficjalnych dokumentach został zapisany jako Lesane Parish Crooks. Dopiero gdy jego matka, Alice Faye Williams (po ślubie Afeni ...

  24. Eminem wrote a heartwarming letter to Tupac's mother thanking her ...

    The emotional letter was included in the "California Love" rapper's biography, "Tupac Remembered" and also showed up on an exhibit at the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain ...

  25. List of songs recorded by Tupac Shakur

    Johnny "J", 2Pac "Runnin' (Dying to Live)" 2003 Tupac: Resurrection: The Notorious B.I.G. Eminem "Runnin' On E" 2001 Until the End of Time: Outlawz: 2Pac "Same Song" 1991 This Is an EP Release / Nothing But Trouble soundtrack: Digital Underground: Shock G "Salsa Con Soulfood" 1992 Chicano Blues: Funky Aztecs "Scared Straight" 2006 Pac's Life ...