She and the rest of the Panther 21 were acquitted a month before Tupac was born. Despite a total lack of training and experience in law, Afeni Shakur had represented herself in court, cross-examining witnesses and getting an undercover cop to admit that he'd tried to set the group up, that they hadn't done anything wrong. While his mother Afeni was pregnant with him, she'd been one of the Panther 21, a group of activists accused of plotting to blow up police stations. Both of his parents had been Black Panthers. Shakur had plenty of background in activism. Shock offered Pac a job with Digital Underground as a favor to his manager Pac had been talking about leaving rap behind to go take a job as a Black activist at an Atlanta college. That death would await him just a year and a half later.ĭigital Underground leader Shock G already knew that Tupac Shakur was heading for great things.
Again and again, Pac envisioned his death in song. Pac himself once said that Me Against The World was "like a blues record"-a chance to vent about the different perils and pitfalls he saw waiting for him. Pac recorded Me Against The World while staring down a possible prison sentence, and while he was starting to suspect many of his closest friends of plotting against him and trying to kill him. Me Against The World, the album that the rapper known as 2Pac released while sitting in a New York jail cell, is probably the album where Pac got deepest in the the different sides of his persona. He was old enough to rent a car for just the last three months of his life. Shakur had the sensitive soul of an artist, but he was also a meal ticket for a lot of street figures, as so many sensitive and artistic souls have long been. Institutional racism, drug addiction, and trauma had affected him since childhood. Tupac Shakur was a thoughtful, introspective person, but he was also a wild young man who never truly got an opportunity to mature. But if those layers seemed like contradictions, they weren't so hard to figure out. The same man who bemoaned the evils of street violence would also bark out gun-talk threats and would eventually die by gun violence. At the time, critics would marvel that the same rapper who made tender, heartfelt odes to women-"Dear Mama," "Keep Ya Head Up"-would also rage about the scandalous skeezers in his life and would, in fact, to go jail for sexual assault. Tupac Shakur's complexity wasn't so complex. People who'd never heard a 2Pac song would have opinions about the things happening in the man's life. In the last years of his life, America's daily newspapers would breathlessly recount the latest details of Shakur's various trials and resentments and alliances. Everything important that would happen in rap music in the next few years would somehow relate back to Tupac Shakur, even after his own death.
Whether by design or through a lurid and unpredictable sequence of events, Tupac Shakur was rap's protagonist by the time he released 1995's Me Against The World, his third album.
A few months later, Shakur was in prison, but he also had the #1 album in America. Sitting in that wheelchair, Shakur learned that he'd been convicted of sexual assault, and a judge sentenced him to between 18 months and four and a half years in prison. Shakur always angrily insisted that he was innocent, that they'd merely had consensual sex. A year earlier, a woman had accused Shakur and two other men of raping her in a hotel room. The next day, Shakur sat in a New York courtroom in a wheelchair. Against doctors' orders, he checked himself out just a few hours after getting out of surgery. When Shakur resisted, the gunmen shot him five times. In the studio's lobby, three gunmen beat and robbed Shakur and the two men he had with him. In November of 1994, Tupac Amaru Shakur was on his way into Manhattan's Quad Studios to record a guest verse.
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