biography of tupac

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What was Tupac Shakur’s family like?

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

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Tupac Shakur

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• Rolling Stone - 8 ways Tupac Shakur changed the World
• AllMusic - Biography of 2Pac
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• Tupac Shakur - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

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

How did Tupac Shakur start rapping?

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

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

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

Is Tupac Shakur actually dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tupac Shakur

• Born June 16 , 1971 · East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
• Died September 13 , 1996 · Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (homicide)
• Birth name Lesane Parish Crooks
• Height 5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
• 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 album "2Pacalypse Now," but this album was also the beginning of his notoriety as a leading figure of the gangster permutation of hip-hop, with references to cop killing and sexual violence. His solo movie career also began in this year with Juice (1992) , and in 1992 he co-starred with Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice (1993) . However, law confrontations were soon to come: A 15-day jail term in 1994 for assault and battery and, in 1995, a conviction for sexual assault of a female fan. After serving 8 months pending an appeal, Shakur was released from jail. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Bruce Cameron <[email protected]>
• Notorious 25-year-old gangsta MC and actor Tupac Shakur was shot and killed before he had a chance to fulfill the promise of a successful career in both fields. He was born in New York City and his mother, Afeni Shakur , was a member of the Black Panther Party. Shakur spent much of his youth in Harlem, then Baltimore, Maryland. In 1988 his family moved to Oakland, California, where he first gained notice as an MC in 1991 with the group Digital Underground. Later that year, he released a solo album, "2Pacalypse Now." Filled with violent lyrics that promoted cop killing and misogyny, it earned both notoriety and acclaim for fans of the genre. Shakur began his acting career in the late 1980s with an appearance on the television series A Different World (1987) . He made his feature film debut in 1992 with the film Juice (1992) and followed it up, co-starring with Janet Jackson , in Poetic Justice (1993) in 1993. Shakur had a certain charisma that always made him stand out in his films. This was especially true in Gridlock'd (1997) which proved that the versatile young artist had the makings of being a major star. Unfortunately, he was murdered during a drive-by shooting outside a Las Vegas, Nevada, hotel a few months before its release. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Gilbert Lee
• Tupac Amaru Shakur (born Lesane Parish Crooks; June 16, 1971 - September 13, 1996), also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper and actor. Shakur sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. His double-disc albums All Eyez on Me (1996) and his Greatest Hits (1998) are among the best-selling albums in the United States. Shakur is consistently ranked as one of the greatest and most influential rappers of all time, and he has been listed and ranked as one of the greatest artists of any genre by many publications, including Rolling Stone, which ranked him 86th on its list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. On April 7, 2017, Shakur was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Shakur began his career as a roadie, backup dancer and MC for the alternative hip hop group Digital Underground, eventually branching off as a solo artist. Most of the themes in Shakur's songs revolved around the violence and hardship in inner cities, racism, and other social issues. Both of his parents and several other people in his family were members of the Black Panther Party, whose ideals were reflected in his songs. During the latter part of his career, Shakur was a vocal participant during the East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry, becoming involved in conflicts with other rappers, producers, and record-label staff members, most notably The Notorious B.I.G. and his label, Bad Boy Records. Aside from his career in music, Shakur was also an actor, starring in six films and one TV show in the 1990s, including Poetic Justice (1993), Gang Related (1997) and Gridlock'd (1997). On September 7, 1996, Shakur was fatally shot four times in a drive-by shooting at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was taken to University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, where he died from his injuries six days later. Shakur was born on June 16, 1971, into an African-American family in the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City. His birth name was Lesane Parish Crooks. The following year, he was renamed after Túpac Amaru II, the 18th-century Peruvian revolutionary who was executed after leading an indigenous uprising against Spanish rule. His parents, Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams in North Carolina) and Billy Garland, were active members of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lesane 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 trial. Many people in Shakur's life were involved with the Black Liberation Army; some were convicted of serious criminal offenses and imprisoned, including his mother. His godfather, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a high-ranking Black Panther, had been convicted of murdering a school teacher during a 1968 robbery, although his sentence was later overturned. His stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, spent four years at large on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, beginning in 1982. Mutulu was wanted for having helped his friend (no relation) Assata Shakur (also known as Joanne Chesimard), Tupac's godmother, to escape from a penitentiary in New Jersey in 1979. She had been imprisoned since 1977 for killing a state trooper in 1973. She lived as a fugitive for several years before gaining asylum in Cuba in 1985. Mutulu was caught in 1986 and eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for the 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck, during which two police officers and a guard were killed. Shakur had an older stepbrother, Mopreme "Komani" Shakur, and a half-sister, Sekyiwa, two years his junior. Mopreme performed in many of his recordings. In 1986, the family moved from New York to Baltimore, Maryland. After completing his second year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Shakur 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. Shakur, accompanied by one of his friends, Dana "Mouse" Smith, as his beat box, 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. Shakur developed a close friendship with 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. He began dating the daughter of the director of the local chapter of the Communist Party USA. In 1988, Shakur and his family moved from Baltimore to Marin City, California, a small unincorporated suburban community located 5 miles north of San Francisco. He attended Tamalpais High School in nearby Mill Valley. Before using his first name as his rap name, Shakur went by the alias MC New York when starting his career in Baltimore. Although Shakur began recording in 1987, his professional entertainment career did not take off until the early 1990s when he debuted 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. 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. Shakur went on to feature Shock G and Money-B from Digital Underground in his track "I Get Around", which ranked #11 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. In November 1991, Shakur released his debut solo album, 2Pacalypse Now. Though the album did not generate any hit singles, 2Pacalypse Now has been acclaimed 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, the rights to its distribution are now owned by Amaru Entertainment, the label owned by Shakur's mother. The album's name is a reference to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In late 1993, Shakur formed the group Thug Life with a number of his friends, including Big Syke (Tyruss Himes), Macadoshis (Diron Rivers), his stepbrother Mopreme Shakur, and the Rated R (Walter Burns). 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, though Amaru Entertainment has since gained the rights to it. Among the notable tracks are "Bury Me a G", "Cradle to the Grave", "Pour Out a Little Liquor" (which also appears on the soundtrack to the 1994 film Above the Rim), "How Long Will They Mourn Me?" and "Str8 Ballin'". As a result of criticism of gangsta rap at the time, the original version of the album was scrapped and re-recorded with many of the original songs being cut. 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, Shakur performed the planned first single from the album, "Out on Bail" at the 1994 Source Awards. Thug Life: Volume 1 was certified Gold. The track "How Long Will They Mourn Me?" later appeared on 2Pac's posthumous Greatest Hits album. Shakur's third album, Me Against The World, was released in March 1995 and 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 Shakur's fourth-best-selling album with 3,524,567 copies sold in the United States as of 2011. Me Against the World won best rap album at the 1996 Soul Train Music Awards. All Eyez On Me was the fourth studio album by 2Pac, recorded in October 1995 and 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. Steve Huey of AllMusic stated 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 five 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 in the top 100 for one-week Soundscan sales since 1991. By the end of 1996, the album had sold 5 million copies. 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. In October 1995, Shakur was released from prison after serving nine months of a sentence for sexual assault and formed a new group called Outlaw Immortalz. Shakur joined the Death Row label, under which he released the single "California Love". On February 13, 1996, Shakur released his fourth solo album, All Eyez on Me. This double album was the first and second of his three-album commitment to Death Row Records. It sold more than nine million copies. The record was a general departure from the introspective subject matter of Me Against the World, being more oriented toward a thug and gangsta mentality. Shakur continued his recordings despite increasing problems at the Death Row label. Dr. Dre left his post as in-house producer to form his own label, Aftermath. Shakur continued to produce hundreds of tracks during his time at Death Row, most of which would be released on his posthumous albums Still I Rise, Until the End of Time, Better Dayz, Loyal to the Game and Pac's Life. He also began the process of recording an album, One Nation, with the New York-based Boot Camp Clik and their label Duck Down Records. On June 4, 1996, he and Outlawz released the diss track "Hit 'Em Up", a scathing lyrical assault on The Notorious B.I.G. and others associated with him. In the track, Shakur claimed to have had sexual intercourse with Faith Evans, the wife of Wallace, Shakur's former friend and rival, and attacked Bad Boy's street credibility. Shakur was convinced that some members associated with Bad Boy had known about the 1994 attack on him due to their behavior that night and the information that his sources gave to him. According to a 2005 interview with Jimmy Henchman, in Vibe magazine, after the attack, Shakur immediately accused Henchman, an associate of Bad Boy CEO Sean Combs, of orchestrating the attack. Shakur, therefore, aligned himself with Suge, Death Row's CEO, who was already bitter toward Combs over a 1995 incident at the Platinum Club in Atlanta, Georgia, which culminated in the death of Jake Robles, the friend and bodyguard of Suge Knight; Knight was adamant in voicing his suspicions about Combs' involvement. In the years following their killings, associates of both Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. made comments indicating the pair, were it not for their deaths, would have reconciled. When Shakur recorded "Hit 'Em Up", a diss song toward Biggie, he recruited three members from the former group, Dramacydal, with whom he had worked previously and was eager to do so again. Shakur, with the three New Jersey rappers and other associates, formed the original lineup of the Outlawz. When 2Pac signed to Death Row after his release from prison, he recruited step brother Mopreme Shakur and Big Syke from Thug Life. Hussein Fatal, Napoleon, E.D.I. Mean, Kastro, Yaki Kadafi, and Storm (the only female Outlaw) were also added, and together they formed the original lineup of the Outlaw Immortalz that debuted on 2Pac's Multi-Platinum smash All Eyez on Me. They later dropped the Immortal part of their name after the untimely deaths of 2Pac and Yaki Kadafi and moved on as Outlawz without the members of Thug Life. Young Noble was later added and appeared on 2Pac's second Death Row release The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. It was on 2Pac's Makaveli album that Outlawz first came to the greater rap community's notice, appearing on a few songs. The idea behind the group was for each member to have a rap name coinciding with the names of various tyrants or enemies of America, past, and present. Outlawz chose in later years to make a backronym out of the letters of their group name Operating Under Thug Laws as Warriorz although it does not stand for the group's name and is used infrequently. - IMDb Mini Biography By: ahmetkozan
• Spouse Keisha Morris (April 29, 1995 - 1996) (annulled)
• Parents Afeni Shakur Billy Garland Mutulu Shakur
• Relatives Sekyiwa Shakur (Half Sibling) Mopreme Shakur (Sibling) Nzingha Shakur (Niece or Nephew) Malik Shakur (Niece or Nephew) Billy Lesane (Cousin) Greg Lesane (Cousin) Kenny Lesane (Cousin) Scott Lesane (Cousin) Dante Powers (Cousin) Rose Belle (Grandparent) Walter Williams Jr. (Grandparent) N'Neka Garland (Half Sibling) Gloria Cox (Aunt or Uncle) Jamala Lesane (Cousin)
• Socially conscious lyrics
• Shaved head and goatee
• 'Thug Life' tattoo across stomach
• Wearing a bandana tied at the front
• Nostril piercing
• Recorded close to 150 songs during the final year of his life, and often completed three songs per day in the same period. Shakur also wrote lyrics in the studio and often performed his verses in one take. He felt that rappers who could not perform their verses properly on the first take weren't ready to be rappers. R&B music, on the other hand, was worthy of multiple takes for the vocal tracks, he felt.
• He read for the role of Bubba Blue in Forrest Gump (1994) , which went to Mykelti Williamson .
• 10 albums have been released after his 1996 death; all have gone platinum.
• Shakur renamed his publishing company to "Joshua's Dream" in honor of a young, terminally ill child whose dying wish was to meet him.
• His favorite singer was Prince .
• Everybody's at war with different things...I'm at war with my own heart sometimes". In Vibe interview 2/96
• Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.
• The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.
• The reason why I could get into acting was because it takes nothing to get out of who I am and go into somebody else.
• I'm not saying I'm gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.

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Why Tupac Never Died

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

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

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

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tupac shakur (1971-1996).

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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 Legacy, 20 Years On

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

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

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

Code Switch

Code switch: why do we still care about tupac.

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

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

Interview Highlights

On what distinguished Tupac's music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Music Interviews

Reflections on tupac from afeni shakur.

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

On Tupac's efforts to build his own legacy

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

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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.

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Tupac Shakur

Tupac shakur.

All Inductees >

INDUCTED BY

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

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

HALL OF FAME ESSAY

By Alan Light

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

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

Back to All Inductees

Nile Rodgers

‘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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. He was a master storyteller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. It's all in the samples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The power of his voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Stacks, layers and husk

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

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

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

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

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

5. The sense of urgency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tupac Shakur Biography

Birthday: June 16 , 1971 ( Gemini )

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

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

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Nick Name: 2Pac, Makaveli

Girlfriend: Kidada Jones

Also Known As: Tupac Amaru Shakur

Died At Age: 25

Spouse/Ex-: Keisha Morris

father: Billy Garland

mother: Afeni Shakur

Born Country: United States

Quotes By Tupac Shakur Died Young

Died on: September 13 , 1996

place of death: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Cause of Death: Assassination

Grouping of People: Black Men

City: New York City

U.S. State: New Yorkers

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Tupac Shakur Biography

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

Tupac Shakur Digital Bio

GOVERNMENT NAME: TUPAC AMARU SHAKUR

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

Hip-Hop Bio:

Tupac Amaru Shakur was an inspiration to millions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1991–92: 2Pacalypse Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1995: Prison sentence, Me Against the World and bail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date October 24, 2023
• Dimensions 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.4 inches
• ISBN-10 1524761044
• ISBN-13 978-1524761042
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (October 24, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524761044
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524761042
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.72 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.4 inches
• #33 in Rap & Hip-Hop Musician Biographies
• #36 in Rap Music (Books)
• #497 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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• Instrumentals
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• Pac’s Family
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DL: 2Pac – O.H. 2 N.O. (Live)

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, new exclusive leaks of 2pac mugshots, november 18, 1993, 1995-09-10 / 2pac loves tronya, rare photo at clinton correctional facility, 1991-06-29 / 2pac and digital underground during the “budweiser superfest”, most valuable 2pac collectibles, how tupac shakur changed hip-hop, surprising facts about tupac shakur, ”nothing 2 lose” handwritten lyrics, 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, 2pac’s influence on street art: a graffiti journey, tupac’s favorite hobbies, how many songs does tupac have (updating…), left eye interview about tupac shakur, sister 2 sister magazine (1998), 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.

Tupac Shakur Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read for Keisha Morris, here .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Dear Mama:” The Story Behind Tupac Shakur’s Hit Song about His Mother

A new docuseries about Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur, reexamines the relationship at the center of one of Tupac’s most celebrated songs.

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A new five-part docuseries, also called Dear Mama , reexamines the relationship between mother and son that Tupac first laid to bare in one of his most celebrated songs. The series highlights Tupac and Afeni’s estrangement and recon ciliation, as well as Afeni’s political activism and efforts to overcome her drug addiction. The first two episodes premiere today on FX at 10 p.m. ET/PT and stream on Hulu Saturday.

Here is the story behind the song “Dear Mama” and the mother-son relationship that inspired it.

Who Was Afeni Shakur?

Afeni Shakur was a political activist and member of the Black Panther Party before her son Tupac was born. She was part of the Panther 21, a group of 21 Black Panther members arrested in 1969 for allegedly planning coordinated bombings and rifle attacks on police stations and offices in New York City.

The youngest of the group at age 22, Afeni faced a possible 300-year sentence if convicted. She was the first for whom the Black Panther Party raised bail so that she could help raise more money to have the others released. During her trial, Afeni represented herself, interviewing several witnesses on the stand.

Her cross-examination revealed that undercover police officers who had infiltrated the Black Panther Party had not actually witnessed any criminal activity. The Washington Post wrote that Afeni “demolished” the case, and the Panther 21 were acquitted in May 1971. She gave birth to Tupac one month later.

Tupac’s father, Billy Garland, lost contact with Afeni when Tupac was 5, and Tupac would not see him again until he was 23. Raising Tupac and his half-sister alone , Afeni worked as a paralegal before falling into a crack cocaine addiction in the early 1980s. The family had to move often, living off welfare because she could not keep a job, according to Vanity Fair .

Estranged, Then Reconciled

By 1989, Afeni and her children were living in California, and Tupac left home because he was “tired of watching his mother wither away,” according to People . 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 her drug habit, which she finally did after moving back to New York City in 1991 and attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She and Tupac reconciled, and they remained close until his death in September 1996.

Moved by everything his mother had overcome in her life, Tupac started to write “Dear Mama,” in which he described living in poverty as a child, his mother’s drug habit, their estrangement, and their eventual reconciliation. In part of the song, he raps:

Even as a crack fiend, Mama You always was a black queen, Mama I finally understand For a woman it ain’t easy tryin’ to raise a man You always was committed A poor single mother on welfare, tell me how you did it There’s no way I can pay you back, but the plan Is to show you that I understand: you are appreciated.

In the song, Shakur also discusses the lack of a father figure during his childhood and the fact that he and his younger sister wrongly blamed Afeni for his absence, writing: “No love from my daddy cause the coward wasn’t there / He passed away and I didn’t cry, cause my anger wouldn’t let me feel for a stranger.”

After writing it, he shared the lyrics with his longtime friend Jada Pinkett , whose mother had also struggled with drug addiction, according to the 2008 book Tupac Remembered: Bearing Witness to a Life and Legacy . “When I heard ‘Dear Mama,’ it gave me a rush of emotions; it still does when I hear it,” Pinkett said. “I marvel at his ability to be in a situation where he could reveal that about his mother. He could share the pain and the loss and the love and the undeniable connection that you have to your mother, no matter what’s going on.”

The Success of “Dear Mama”

“Dear Mama” was the lead track from Me Against the World (1995), one of Tupac’s most celebrated albums. Tupac was serving a prison sentence for a sexual assault case at the time “Dear Mama” was released as a single on February 21, 1995. It became his first top 10 song on the Billboard Hot 100 and would go on to become certified triple-platinum.

Describing the song in October 1995, Tupac said , “I wrote it for my mama because I love her and I felt I owed her something deep.”

The tribute is still considered one of his best songs and continues to receive acclaim long after the rapper’s death. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 18 on its “50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time” list, and a BBC poll of critics found it to be among the 10 greatest hip-hop songs ever released.

In 2010, “Dear Mama” was inducted into the Library of Congress Recording Registry , which preserves “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant works.” It was only the third hip-hop song to be inducted, following Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet.”

When “Dear Mama” was honored by the Library of Congress, Afeni reflected on her relationship with her son and the song’s broader appeal. “It could have been any song, but I’m honored they chose ‘Dear Mama’ in particular,’” she said . “It is a song that spoke not just to me but every mother that has been in that situation, and there have been millions of us. Tupac recognized our struggle, and he is still our hero.”

How to Watch Dear Mama

The first two episodes of Dear Mama premiere tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX. You can also watch them on Hulu starting Saturday. The final three episodes will release weekly on Fridays and stream next day on Hulu.

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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