Happy Birthday to one of the greats that ever picked up a mic and told his story.
A little bit about him.
Hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur was embroiled in a feud between East Coast
and West Coast rappers and was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1996,
leaving behind an influential musical legacy at the age of 25.
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's fifth album — Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory —
was released just eight weeks after his death. It would also reach No.
1. It was the first of six posthumous studio albums, up to and including
Pac's Life in 2006 — two more than Tupac managed when he was alive. He has sold more than 75 million albums to date.
On
April 7, 2017 Tupac Shakur received one of music's highest honors by
being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A worthy inclusion
for a rapper held by many to have been the greatest of all time.
A biopic, All Eyez on Me, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is now in theaters today.
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