The 90’s rap figure, a very controversial artist, emblematic of the gangsta style and frantic life from start to finish, the death of Tupac Shakur, who turned twenty years old, turned him into a fallen hero and a legend for The American hip-hop.
A shooting that took place on September 7, 1996 in Las Vegas, which would cause his death six days later, when he was 25 years old, put the finishing touches to the career of a rapper with an unmistakable talent for rhymes, but also very Controversial and with innumerable problems with the law.
Tupac Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 in New York, the son of a prominent black rights activist and member of the Black Panthers who for the name of his son was inspired by Tupac Amaru II, A revolutionary descendant of the Incas who led a liberation movement in colonial America.
Tupac (also known as 2Pac) was raised between poverty and street violence and as a teenager, he entered an art school in Baltimore, where he developed his interest in music and acting. The rapper combined the political and racial allegiances with the postulates of the gangsta style.
The career of the greatest Tupac
His first professional experience in the world of hip-hop came from the hand of the Californian group Digital Underground, which took to Tupac on tour like personnel of the band. The album, 2Pacalypse Now (1991) was the first step of a career in which Tupac combined political and racial allegiances with the postulates of gangsta style, a rap stream that aspired to portray the misery, violence and racism of the ghettos, But which, according to his critics, glorified the lives of thugs and criminals.
In 1994 he spent eight months in jail for sexual assault, until he signed for Death Records by Suge Knight, who took his bail. The war that ended his life After Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993) and Me Against the World (1995), Tupac published the album All Eyez on Me (1996) already installed in Los Angeles, where he would live and be part of the hard fight of West Coast rappers (Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, Tupac himself) against the East Coast (The Notorious BIG, Sean Combs).
Among other things, Tupac accused the artists of the East of being behind a shooting in New York in 1994 in which it was near to lose the life. Death stalked the rapper. On September 7, 1996, after attending a Mike Tyson boxing match, Tupac was seriously injured in Las Vegas when a group of attackers shot the car he was traveling with Suge Knight.
From the time of his unresolved murder, Tupac’s legend grew exponentially, although controversy persists over his figure, as journalist Danyel Smith accurately summed up in The Vibe History of Hip-Hop (1999).