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A quarter of a century after the shooting that took his life, Tupac Shakur, one of the most important myths in the history of rap, is still very much present in popular culture thanks to new works and projects that remember him.
On September 7, 1996, Tupac was the victim of a shooting in the streets of Las Vegas that resulted in his death six days later.
An emblem of 1990s rap and icon of the controversial “gangsta” style, Tupac, who was only 25 when he died, was noted for both his innovative and hard-hitting work and his frequent run-ins with the law in a wild and controversial life from start to end.
This summer, Tupac has returned to screens with director Nick Broomfield’s documentary Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac, which explores the unsolved mysteries behind the deaths of Tupac and no less charismatic rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
Broomfield is very familiar with the subject since in 2002 he presented the documentary “Biggie and Tupac” on the same subject.
FX has another ambitious project in the works with “Outlaw: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur”, a documentary series that will delve into the lives of the musician and his mother Afeni.
Afeni, a leading black rights activist and member of the Black Panthers, drew inspiration for her son’s name from Tupac Amaru II, a revolutionary of Incan descent who led a liberation movement in colonial America.
On the fiction side, 2017 saw the release of “All Eyez on Me,” a biopic about Tupac that starred Demetrius Shipp Jr. but met with little press or public acclaim.
And the posthumous accolades for Tupac from music have not stopped over the years since he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.
The life of Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 in New York, grew up among the poverty and violence of the streets, and as a teenager he entered an art school in Baltimore.
The album “2Pacalypse Now” (1991) was the first step in a career in which Tupac combined political and racial allegations with the tenets of the “gangsta” style, a current of rap that aspired to portray the misery, violence and racism of the ghettos but which, according to its critics, glorified the life of thugs and criminals.
Almost parallel to his breakthrough in music, Tupac made his film debut with starring roles in “Juice” (1992) and “Poetic Justice” (1993.)
Tupac also became notorious for his numerous legal problems, so much so that his real life seemed almost a mirror image of his troubled lyrics.
Incidents with firearms and confrontations with the police put him in the eye of Justice on several occasions until he spent eight months in jail in 1994 for sexual assault.
After “Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.G.A.Z.” (1993) and “Me Against the World (1995), Tupac released the album “All Eyez on Me” (1996) already installed in Los Angeles, where he would be part of the hard confrontation of the rappers of the West Coast against the East Coast (The Notorious B.I.G., among them) until his death in a crime that remains unsolved.
