Tupac shakur grew up around nothing but self-delusion. His
mother, Alica Faye Williams, thought she was a
"revolutionary." She called herself "Afeni Shakur and
associated with members of the ill-fate Black Panther Party, a
movement that wanted to feed school kids breakfast and earn civil
rights for African Americans.
During her youth she dropped out of high school, partied with
North Carolina gang members, then moved to Brooklyn: After an affair
with one of Malcolm X's bodyguards, she became political. When the
mostly white United Federation of Teachers went on strike in 1968,
she crossed the picket line and taught the children herself. After
this she joined a New York chapter of the Black Panther Party and
fell in with an organizer named Lumumba. She took to ranting about
killing "the pigs" and overthrowing the government, which
eventually led to her arrest and that of twenty comrades for
conspiring to set off a race war. Pregnant, she made bail and told
her husband, Lummuba, it wasn't his child. Behind his back she had
been carrying on with Legs (a small-time associate of Harlem drug
baron Nicky Barnes) and Billy Garland (a member of the Party).
Lumumba immediately divorced fer.Things went downhill for Afeni:
Bail revoked, she was imprisoned in the Women's House of Detention
in Greenwich Village. In her cell she patted her belly and said,
"This is my prince. He is going to save the black nation."
By the time Tupac was born on June 16, 1971, Afeni had already
defended herself in court and been acquitted on 156 counts. Living
in the Bronx, she found steady work as a paralegal and tried to
raise her son to respect the value of an education.
From childhood, everyone called him the "Black Prince."
For misbehaving, he had to read an entire edition of The New York
Times. But she had no answer when he asked about his daddy.
"She just told me, 'I don't know who your daddy is.' It wasn't
like she was a slut or nothin'. It was just some rough
times."When he was two, his sister, Sekyiwa, was born. This
child's father, Mutulu, was a Black Panther who, a few months before
her birth, had been sentenced to sixty years for a fatal armored car
robbery.
With Mutulu away, the family experienced hard times. No matter
where they moved-the Bronx, Harlem, homeless shelters-Tupac was
distressed. "I remember crying all the time. My major thing
growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere. I
didn't have no buddies that I grew up with."
As time passed, the issue of his father tormented him. He felt
"unmanly," he said. Then his cousins started saying he had
an effeminate face. "I don't know. I just didn't feel hard. I
could do all the things my mother could give me, but she couldn't
give me nothing else."
The loneliness began to wear on him. He retreated into writing
love songs and poetry. "I remember I had a book like a diary.
And in that book I said I was going to be famous." He wanted to
be an actor. Acting was an escape from his dismal life. He was good
at it, eager to leave his crummy family behind. "The reason why
I could get into acting was because it takes nothin' to get out of
who I am and go into somebody else."
His mother enrolled him in the 127th Street Ensemble, a theater
group in the impoverished Harlem section of Manhattan, where he
landed his first role at age twelve, that of Travis in A Raisin in
the Sun. "I lay on a couch and played sleep for the first
scene. Then I woke up and I was the only person onstage. I can
remeber thinking, "This is the best shit in the world!"
That got me real high. I was gettin' a secret: This is what my
cousins can't do."
In Baltimore, at age fifteen, he fell into rap; he started
writing lyrics, walking with a swagger, and milking his background
in New York for all it was worth. People in small towns feared the
Big Apple's reputation; he called himself MC New York and made
people think he was a tough guy.
He enrolled in the illustrious Balitomore School for the Arts,
where he studied acting and ballet with white kids and finally felt
"in touch" with himself. "Them white kids had things
we never seen," he said. "That was the first time I saw
there was white people who you could get along with. Before that, I
just believed what everyone else said: They was devils. But I loved
it. I loved going to school. It taught me a lot. I was starting to
feel like I really wanted to be an artist.
By the time he was twenty, Shakur had been arrested eight times,
even serving eight months in prison after being convicted of sexual
abuse. In addition, he was the subject of two wrongful-death
lawsuits, one involving a six-year-old boy who was killed after
getting caught in gang-war crossfire between Shakur's gang and a
rival group.
In the late eighties, Shakur teamed up with Humpty-Hump (a.k.a.
Eddie Humphrey, a.k.a. Gregory "Shock-G" Jacobs) and other
Oakland-based rappers to create Digital Underground, a band intent
on massive bass beats and frenetic, Parliament-Funkadelic-style
rhythms. In 1990, the group released its debut and best album, Sex
Packets, a pulsating testament to the boogie power of hip-hop,
featuring two classic tracks, "Humpty Dance" and "Doowutchyalike."
After an EP of re-mixes in 1991, D.U. released Sons of the P and,
the following year, The Body-Hat Syndrome, all on Tommy Boy Records.
In 1992, Shakur entered a most fruitful five-year period. He
broke free of D.U. and made his solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now, a
gangsta rap document that put him in the notorious, high-speed lane
to stardom. That same year he starred in Juice, an acclaimed
low-budget film about gangs which saw some Hollywood success. In
1993, he recorded and released Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., an album
that found Shakur crossing over to the pop charts. Unfortunately, he
also found himself on police blotters, when allegations of a violent
attack on an off-duty police officer and sexual misconduct arose.
The same year, Shakur played a single father and Janet Jackson's
love interest in the John Singleton film Poetic Justice.
In November of 1994, he was shot five times during a robbery in
which thieves made off with $40,000 worth of his jewelry. Shakur
miraculously recovered from his injuries to produce his most
impressive artistic accomplishments, including 1995's Me Against the
World, which sold two million copies, and the double-CD All Eyez on
Me, which sold nearly three million. As his career arc began a steep
rise toward fame and fortune, Shakur was shot (most say
suspiciously) and killed after watching a Mike Tyson fight with
Death Row Records president Marion "Suge" Knight. Though
his death was a jolt to his fans and the music community, Shakur
himself often said that he expected he'd die by the sword before he
reached thirty.
Following his passing, Shakur's label released an album, The Don
Killuminati, under the pseudonym "Makaveli." The cover
depicted Shakur nailed to a cross under a crown of thorns, with a
map of the country's major gang areas superimposed on it. In January
of 1997, Gramercy pictures released Gridlock'd, a film in which
Shakur played the role of a drug addict to mostly good reviews. His
final film, Gang Related, was released in 1997, and Death Row is
said to have several unreleased recordings in the vaults for
potential future release.
