Suge was that dude.” Tupac made some horrendous choices but he had good reason to be paranoid “He just needed someone to pull the pin out of the grenade and throw him in somebody’s direction. “The dude is a ticking time bomb,” says journalist Justin Tinsley. A former linebacker and bodyguard with a reputation for violence and criminality, Knight bailed out Tupac pending appeal and shoved him into the frontline of a feud between east and west coast rappers that was partly the result of real personal grudges and partly a reckless marketing ploy. Sentenced to prison on the sexual abuse charge, he was broke, paranoid and humiliated – vulnerabilities that were thoroughly exploited by Suge Knight, CEO of Death Row Records.
#2pac changes trial
While on trial for sexual abuse, sodomy and weapons charges, he was shot at a recording studio, a murder attempt he blamed on New York hip-hop stars Sean “Puffy” Combs and the Notorious BIG. He committed too fully to a role that he might have outgrown were it not for the events of 1994. But once gangsta rap took off, he sculpted himself into someone harder and meaner, lest anyone think his lyrics weren’t the real deal. In early songs such as Keep Ya Head Up and Brenda’s Got a Baby, Tupac was still the Panther’s son, sensitive to injustice. Rappers often make good actors because they are role-players and storytellers.
#2pac changes movie
He landed his first movie role in 1991, the same year he released his debut album. Former teachers and students at his two high schools, where he played Othello and the Mouse King, remember him as a sweet, thoughtful theatre kid who loved poetry and dance. Tupac’s brief, protean life has taken on allegorical power and New Yorker writer Sheldon Pearce’s oral history clarifies the turning points. He talks instead of survival and revenge: “Fear is stronger than love.” The following year, he was shot dead at the age of 25. When we see him again, in an interview from 1995, some vital part of him has shut down.
His mother, Afeni Shakur, gave birth just weeks after she was acquitted in the 1971 trial of the Panther 21, and raised him to think that he was “the Black Prince of the revolution”. Even as an unknown teenager, he flares with charisma as he talks about reviving the revolutionary spirit of the Black Panthers. T here’s a clip in Adam Curtis’s documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head of an interview Tupac Shakur gave when he was a high school student in California in 1988.
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