Tupac, who escaped his violent, tumultuous upbringing to enrol at Baltimore School for the Arts to study acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet, performing Shakespeare and the role of the Mouse King in The Nutcracker. This was the first time the world had truly been exposed to Tupac Shakur as he was before his tough showboating days: Tupac, the baby who was born only a month after his mother Afeni (a former crackhead) was acquitted of more than 150 charges of “Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks.” Tupac, whose parents, godfather, and stepfather were all high-ranking Black Panthers (his uncle spent four years of the ’80s on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list). The bassy hoarseness of his voice is strained, as though he is trying in vain to internalise difficult emotions, overcome as he stands in the mic booth. “More bodies being buried/ I’m losing my homies in a hurry/ They’re relocating to the cemetery/ Got me worried, stressing, my vision’s blurry/ The question is will I live?/ No one in the world loves me/ I’m headed for danger, don’t trust strangers/ Put one in the chamber whenever I’m feeling this anger/ Don’t wanna make excuses, cause this is how it is, what’s the use?/ Unless we’re shooting no one notices the youth,” Shakur raps on the title track. Pained, afraid, and searching for answers, he writes everything down and sends it to us as an open letter. He consciously unearths the demons that lay scattered in his mind, hoping that through exposition they may be defeated. The Rodney King riots had recently seen Los Angeles erupt with a vitriolic violence that had lain dormant beneath the surface, waiting for a catalyst on Me Against the World, Shakur experiences a similar moment of personal eruption, not that of violence but of regret. These were notes from an America that was seldom reported in the mainstream press, and seldom acknowledged. Scarface’s dark storytelling on 1994’s The Diary was perhaps the closest precursor to such rhymes, but even so, the confessional lines on Shakur’s third album were shockingly open: “Homie died in my arms, with his brains hangin’, fucked up/ I had to tell him it was alright, and that’s a lie/ And he knew it when he shook and died, my God.” “I’m hopeless, they should’ve killed me as a baby/ And now they got me trapped in the storm, I’m goin’ crazy,” Shakur raps on Lord Knows and the honesty is confronting. When Me Against the World was released, it touched on subject matter that had seldom before been explored in hip hop. His first two records - 2Pacalypse Now and Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… - had been tough, political albums, unabashedly confrontational in the style of the times strong records which nevertheless lacked much of the charismatic, gifted songwriting that his best releases would see. This was all quite a departure for the young Harlem-born rapper. I get to tell my innermost, darkest secrets. And it took a whole album to get it all out. Everybody thought I was living so well and doing so good that I wanted to explain it. It was all my fears, all the things I just couldn’t sleep about. Lyrically concerned with paranoia, loss, innocence, injustice, and persecution, and featuring slower, more soulful production, Me Against the World was described by Shakur as thus: Recorded at the time of his shooting and the widely-publicised sexual assault trial, and released during his eleven month stint in prison, Me Against the World was understandably the rapper’s darkest work to date. He was sentenced to up to four and a half years in prison. and Bad Boy Records boss Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs.Ī day after leaving hospital, Shakur was imprisoned for sexual assault involving a female fan - a charge he denied until his dying day. He would later blame the shooting on former associate and fellow rapper The Notorious B.I.G. In 1994 the rapper was robbed and shot five times in the Quad Recording Studios building in Manhattan following that shooting, Shakur checked himself out of hospital against his doctor’s orders three hours after surgery. Tragically, he was also involved in a wrongful death suit when a 6 year old child was killed when a member of his entourage attempted to pick up a pistol registered to Shakur and accidentally discharged the weapon.
He had been embroiled in legal issues for years, having previously been imprisoned for assault, and investigated in connection with a non-fatal shooting involving off-duty police officers.
At the age of 22, Tupac Shakur was caught in a maelstrom.
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