Tupac Shakur

Bio

Tupac Shakur died on September 13, 1996, in Las Vegas, six days after he was shot in a drive-by on the Strip. He was 25. He had released four studio albums and was in the middle of recording the fifth. In 2023, twenty-seven years later, Las Vegas Metro arrested Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former Crip with documented Tupac-related grievances, and charged him with the murder. The case is, as of 2026, still pending trial. The version of the story that the prosecution is telling is mostly the version Keffe D told publicly in a 2018 BET interview. The actual answer to who pulled the trigger is somebody who was in the car with Keffe D that night. The exact name has been the subject of decades of speculation and may never be settled in court.

He was born Lesane Parish Crooks in East Harlem in 1971 to Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther Party member who had been on trial as part of the Panther 21 while pregnant with him. She was acquitted. She renamed him Tupac Amaru Shakur, after the eighteenth-century Andean revolutionary. He grew up moving — Baltimore, the School for the Arts (where he studied acting and poetry), then Marin City, California, with his family living in transitional housing.

He joined Digital Underground as a roadie and dancer in 1990. By 1991 he had a solo deal with Interscope and a debut album, 2Pacalypse Now, that the Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle, publicly condemned. By 1993 he was a movie star (Juice, then Poetic Justice, then Above the Rim). By 1994 he was the rapper most likely to be doing the most things at the same time. He was making records. He was making movies. He was getting arrested. He was getting sued. He was getting shot, first time, at Quad Recording in Manhattan, November 1994.

He went to prison in 1995 on sexual assault charges and was bailed out by Suge Knight, who signed him to Death Row Records. All Eyez on Me came out in February 1996. It was a double album. It sold five million copies in its first two months. It is, depending on which fan you ask, either his masterpiece or the moment the persona overwhelmed the songwriting.

In the seven months he had left, he recorded most of what would become the Makaveli posthumous record (The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory) and a backlog so deep that posthumous Tupac records are STILL coming out in 2026. The Tupac archive is essentially bottomless. His verses are some of the most quoted in rap. His face is on murals on four continents. He is, fifty years from his birth, one of the most important American artists of the late twentieth century, and the case for that is just the music. Add the politics, the acting, the legend, and there is no argument worth having.