who was Tupac Shakur?
Tupac Shakur was an american rapper and actor who came to embody the 1990’s gangsta rap aesthetic, and who in death became an icon symbolizing noble struggle. He has sold 75 million albums to date, making him one of the top-selling artist of all time. In life, his biggest battle was sometimes with himself. As fate drove him towards the nihilism of gangsta rap, and into the arms of the controversial Death Row Records impresario Suge Knight, the boundaries between Shakur’s art and his life became increasingly blurred — with tragic consequences.
Early life
Tupac was born on June 16, 1971, in Harlem, New York. His mother, Afeni, was raising two children on her own and struggled for money. The family moved homes often, sometimes staying in shelters.
They moved to Baltimore, where Tupac enrolled at the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts, at which he felt “the freest I ever felt.”
Tupac vs. Biggie Smalls (aka The Notorious B.I.G.)
Before Tupac released his third album, there was more trouble. In November 1994, he was shot multiple times in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, Quad, by two young black men.
Tupac believed his rap rival Biggie Smalls was behind the shooting, for which nobody has ever been charged. (Smalls always denied he knew anything; in 2011 Dexter Isaac, a New York prisoner serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime, claimed he was paid to steal from Tupac by the artist manager and mogul James “Henchman” Rosemond, and shot the rapper during the robbery).
In June 1996, Tupac released a diss track, “Hit ‘Em Up,” aimed at Biggie Smalls and his label boss at Bad Boy Records, Sean “Diddy” Combs— ratcheting up the tension between East and West Coast rap. Their rivalry was fast becoming hip hop’s most famous — and ugliest — beef. Within three months, Tupac was murdered.
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