Tupac Shakur is shot five times at Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan

Why it matters

November 30, 1994. Tupac Shakur arrived at Quad Recording Studios at 723 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan around 12:30 a.m. to record a guest verse for a rapper named Little Shawn. As he walked through the lobby with three friends, three men with guns rushed them. Tupac was shot five times: twice in the head, twice in the groin, once through the hand. He survived. He went to the hospital, checked himself out the next day against medical advice, attended his sentencing hearing for a sexual assault conviction in a wheelchair, and went to prison. The Notorious B.I.G., Sean "Puffy" Combs, and Andre Harrell were all in the Quad Studios building that night, on a different floor. Tupac became convinced, sitting in his prison cell at Clinton Correctional Facility in the months after, that the Bad Boy camp had set him up. Whether they had is a question that has never been resolved. What is settled is that Tupac's conviction that they had is the proximate origin of the Tupac vs Notorious B.I.G. beef, which would run for the next two years and end with both of them dead. The Quad shooting is the moment the beef starts. You cannot tell the story of mid-1990s rap without it.