Tupac Shakur was a sensitive, precociously talented yet troubled soul who came to embrace the 1990s gangsta-rap aesthetic and paid the ultimate price — he was gunned down in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996 and died six days later. His murder has never been solved. He began his music career as a rebel with a cause — to articulate the travails and injustices endured by many African-Americans, often from a male point of view. His skill in doing so made him a spokesperson not just for his own generation, but for subsequent ones who continue to face the same struggle for equality. In death he became an icon symbolizing noble struggle, though 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.

Tupac began life as Lesane Parish Crooks in Harlem, New York, on June 16, 1971. His mother, Alice Faye Williams, was the daugher of a North Carolina maid and a high-school dropout who changed her name to Afeni Shakur after becoming actively involved with the Black Panther Party; she also renamed young Lesane Parish as Tupac Amaru, after an 18th-century Peruvian revolutionary who was killed by the Spanish. She had become pregnant with her son in 1970 while on bail after being charged with conspiring to set off a race war — Afeni was acquitted the following year after successfully defending herself in court, displaying a gift for oration that her son would inherit. Tupac’s father, Billy Garland, was also a Panther but lost contact with Afeni when Tupac was five — the rapper would not see his father again until he was 23. “I thought my father was dead all my life,” he told the writer Kevin Powell during an interview with Vibe magazine in 1996. “I felt I needed a daddy to show me the ropes and I didn’t have one.”

Read More…