One and only Tupac Amaru Shakur

Tupac Amaru Shakur (June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), known by his stage names 2Pac, Pac, and Makaveli, was an American rapper and actor. Shakur has sold over 75 million albums worldwide as of 2007,^[2] making him one of the best-selling music artists in the world. Rolling Stone Magazine named him the 86th Greatest Artist of All Time.^[3] Shakur was also an actor.^[4] The themes of most of Tupac's songs are the violence and hardship in inner cities, racism, social problems, and conflicts with other rappers during the East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry. Shakur began his career as a roadie, backup dancer, and MC for the alternative hip hop group Digital Underground.^[5][6][7]
Afeni Shakur and Assata Shakur, his mother and aunt respectively, were involved with the Black Panthers, and Tupac made reference to the organization in the song Changes. Shakur was involved in a West-coast East-coast rivalry after a major feud with East-coast rappers, producers and record-label members of staff.^[8]
On September 7, 1996, Shakur was shot four times in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was taken to the University Medical Center, where he died six days later of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.^[9]

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City.^[10] He was named after Túpac Amaru II,^[11] a Peruvian revolutionary who led an indigenous uprising against Spain and was subsequently executed.^[12]
His mother, Afeni Shakur, and his father, Billy Garland, were active members of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s; he was born just one month after his mother's acquittal on more than 150 charges of "Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks" in the New York Panther 21 court case.^[13]
Although unconfirmed by the Shakur family, several sources (including the official coroner's report) list his birth name as Lesane Parish Crooks.^[1] This name was supposedly entered on the birth certificate because Afeni feared her enemies would attack her son, and disguised his true identity using a different last name. She changed it later, following her separation from Garland and marriage to Mutulu Shakur.^[14]
Struggle and incarceration surrounded Shakur from an early age. His godfather, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a high ranking Black Panther, was convicted of murdering a school teacher during a 1968 robbery, although his sentence was later overturned. His stepfather, Mutulu, spent four years at large on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list beginning in 1982. Mutulu was wanted in part for having helped his sister Assata Shakur (also known as Joanne Chesimard) to escape from a penitentiary in New Jersey, where she had been incarcerated for shooting a state trooper to death in 1973. Mutulu was caught in 1986 and imprisoned for the robbery of a Brinks armored truck in which two police officers and a guard were killed.^[15] Shakur had a half-sister, Sekyiwa, two years his junior, and an older stepbrother, Mopreme "Komani" Shakur, who appeared on many of his recordings.^[16]

At the age of twelve, Shakur enrolled in Harlem's 127th Street Repertory Ensemble and was cast as the Travis Younger character in the play A Raisin in the Sun, which was performed at the Apollo Theater. In 1986, the family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland.^[17] After completing his second year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School he transferred to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet. He performed in Shakespeare plays, and in the role of the Mouse King in The Nutcracker.^[15] Shakur, accompanied by one of his friends, Dana "Mouse" Smith, as his beatbox, won most of the many rap competitions that he participated in and was considered to be the best rapper in his school.^[18] He was remembered as one of the most popular kids in his school because of his sense of humor, superior rapping skills, and ability to mix in with all crowds.^[19] He developed a close friendship with a young Jada Pinkett (later Jada Pinkett Smith) that lasted until his death. In the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, Shakur says, "Jada is my heart. She will be my friend for my whole life," and Pinkett Smith calls him "one of my best friends. He was like a brother. It was beyond friendship for us. The type of relationship we had, you only get that once in a lifetime." A poem written by Shakur titled "Jada" appears in his book, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, which also includes a poem dedicated to Pinkett Smith called "The Tears in Cupid's Eyes". During his time in art school, Shakur began dating the daughter of the director of the Baltimore Communist Party USA.^[20]
In June 1988, Shakur and his family moved to Marin City, California, a community of mainly housing projects located 5 miles (8.0 km) north of San Francisco,^[17] where he attended Tamalpais High School in nearby Mill Valley.^[21] He began attending the poetry classes of Leila Steinberg in 1989.^[22] That same year, Steinberg organized a concert with a former group of Shakur's, Strictly Dope; the concert led to him being signed with Atron Gregory who set him up as a roadie and backup dancer with the young rap group Digital Underground in 1990.

Last picture before he died in gun fight

Shakur's professional entertainment career began in the early 1990s, when he debuted his rapping skills in a vocal turn in Digital Underground's "Same Song" from the soundtrack to the 1991 film Nothing but Trouble and also appeared with the group in the film of the same name. The song was later released as the lead song of the Digital Underground EP This is an EP Release, the follow-up to their debut hit album Sex Packets. Shakur appeared in the accompanying music video. After his rap debut, he performed with Digital Underground again on the album Sons of the P. Later, he released his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now.

Me Against The World Album

2Pacalypse Now did not do as well on the charts as future albums, spawning no top ten hits. His second record, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., was released in 1993. The album did better than the previous one debuting on number 24 on the Billboard 200. However, the real commercial success of Tupac Shakur began with his third album titled Me Against the World which debuted on top of the Billboard 200 and sold two million copies. His following album, All Eyez on Me, was Tupac's biggest commercial success. The album debuted at number 1 and has sold 9 million copies till date and is considered among the best rap albums of all time. The rest of the six albums of Tupac were released after his death. Four of these albums have been certified multi-platinum and three of them topped the Billboard 200 while all of these topped the US R&B charts. Tupac's greatest hit album has sold over 10 million copies in US and is certified Diamond by the RIAA.

Shakur's music and philosophy is rooted in many American, African-American, and World entities, including the Black Panther Party, Black nationalism, egalitarianism, and liberty. His debut album, 2Pacalypse Now, revealed the socially conscious side of Shakur. On this album, Shakur attacked social injustice, poverty and police brutality on songs "Brenda's Got a Baby", "Trapped" and "Part Time Mutha". His style on this album was highly influenced by the social consciousness and Afrocentrism pervading hip hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. On this initial release, Shakur helped extend the success of such rap groups as Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, X-Clan, and Grandmaster Flash, as he became one of the first major socially conscious rappers from the West Coast.^[24]
On his second record, Shakur continued to rap about the social ills facing African-Americans, with songs like "The Streetz R Deathrow" and "Last Wordz". He also showed his compassionate side with the anthem "Keep Ya Head Up", while simultaneously putting his legendary aggressiveness on display with the title track from the album Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. he added a salute to his former group Digital Underground by including them on the playful track "I Get Around". Throughout his career, an increasingly aggressive attitude can be seen pervading Shakur's subsequent albums.^[25]
The contradictory themes of social inequality and injustice, unbridled aggression, compassion, playfulness, and hope all continued to shape Shakur's work, as witnessed with the release of his incendiary 1995 album Me Against the World. In 1996, Shakur released All Eyez on Me. Many of these tracks are considered by many critics to be classics, including "Ambitionz Az a Ridah", "I Ain't Mad at Cha", "California Love", "Life Goes On" and "Picture Me Rollin'".; All Eyez on Me was a change of style from his earlier works. While still containing socially conscious songs and themes, Shakur's album was heavily influenced by party tracks and tended to have a more "feel good" vibe than his first albums. Shakur described it as a celebration of life, and the record was critically and commercially successful.^[26]
He had enjoyed and had been influenced by the work of contemporary English and Irish pop musicians as a teenager such as Kate Bush, Culture Club, Sinéad O'Connor and U2

Shakur was a voracious reader. He was inspired by a wide variety of writers, including William Shakespeare, Niccolò Machiavelli, Donald Goines, Sun Tzu, Kurt Vonnegut, Mikhail Bakunin, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Khalil Gibran. In his book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, University of Pennsylvania Avalon Professor of Humanities and African American Studies Michael Eric Dyson describes the experience of visiting the home of Shakur's friend and promoter Leila Steinberg to find "the sea of books" once owned by Shakur.