On his 1995 song Me Against the World, rapper Tupac Shakur uttered his most prophetic lines: After death/ After my last breath/ When will I finally get to rest? Not yet, it seems.
Eight years after he was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Shakur's music and legacy are more relevant than ever and the shadow he casts over American life has never been greater. In the States, he has joined the list of pop stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain whose short lives have assumed near mythical status.
Shakur's back catalogue grows each year and he has now released more records dead than alive. Last year, Forbes magazine ranked him seventh on their richest deceased celebrities list, with earnings of more than $12 million. But it's not just the ringing tills that illustrate his enduring place in people's minds. The story of his life has taken on a significance few would have predicted while he was alive. It has been analysed so much that three American universities run courses about him. At Harvard, you can study Modern Protest Literature: From Thomas Paine to Tupac, while the University of Washington offers The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur. There are also 15 books, four documentaries and a play about him.
Tupac: Resurrection, a feature-length documentary, has been released. The film is narrated by the late rapper: the words are taken from various interviews and the effect is intimate, yet unsettling. Shakur led a life of headline grabbing exploits, and while he didn't leave behind a back catalogue of unquestionable quality, he was a rock star straight out of central casting. He also died at the peak of his career; the last album before his death, All Eyez on Me, went straight to number one in America and sold more than 700,000 copies in its first week.
The interesting thing about Tupac: Resurrection is the way it follows Shakur's makeover from the middle class student at the Baltimore School of Arts who loved ballet and Van Gogh to the self-confessed "thug" who, at the height of his fame, was arrested for shooting two off-duty police officers and convicted of sexually assaulting a girl he met in a New York nightclub.
In Boogaloo, Kempton wrote that Shakur is the "black generation's James Dean", but now he says: I think it's broader than that, in some respects, he is the whole generation's James Dean. He is a poster boy pretty much all over the world. If you go to Romania, you'll find kids who have got his picture on their bedroom walls. He is a music star whose image established him as an iconic, rebel figure in the same way as James Dean emerged in the Fifties. But there was also a political dimension to Shakur's music that set him apart from most of his contemporaries. He was raised by Afeni Shakur, a single mother and leading Black Panther, who passed on her passion for radical politics and social issues. Shakur combined his political heritage with an ability to articulate the concerns of young men who felt alienated from mainstream society.
The recent figure Shakur most closely resembles is Kurt Cobain. At the start of the Nineties, two pop genres rap and grunge burst into the mainstream in the States. Cobain, the Nirvana singer who committed suicide in 1994, was the poster boy for white, suburban angst, an angry, unhappy star suspicious of the trappings brought by fame and wealth. Shakur's occasionally reflective lyrics, if not his behavior, could mirror Cobain.
He spent most of his last year holed up in a studio recording tracks. It was as if he knew that he didn't have long to live and he wanted to express everything he had inside him which could be released for years to come. This is the popular perception, masterminded by his mother, who controls the release of his apparently limitless back catalogue and sanctions the use of his image. Although, like many of the facts about Shakur's life, his prolific output could have a more prosaic explanation.
As the years roll on from his death, the real Shakur becomes harder to find. That just means the myth will keep growing.
Eight years after he was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Shakur's music and legacy are more relevant than ever and the shadow he casts over American life has never been greater. In the States, he has joined the list of pop stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain whose short lives have assumed near mythical status.
Shakur's back catalogue grows each year and he has now released more records dead than alive. Last year, Forbes magazine ranked him seventh on their richest deceased celebrities list, with earnings of more than $12 million. But it's not just the ringing tills that illustrate his enduring place in people's minds. The story of his life has taken on a significance few would have predicted while he was alive. It has been analysed so much that three American universities run courses about him. At Harvard, you can study Modern Protest Literature: From Thomas Paine to Tupac, while the University of Washington offers The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur. There are also 15 books, four documentaries and a play about him.
Tupac: Resurrection, a feature-length documentary, has been released. The film is narrated by the late rapper: the words are taken from various interviews and the effect is intimate, yet unsettling. Shakur led a life of headline grabbing exploits, and while he didn't leave behind a back catalogue of unquestionable quality, he was a rock star straight out of central casting. He also died at the peak of his career; the last album before his death, All Eyez on Me, went straight to number one in America and sold more than 700,000 copies in its first week.
The interesting thing about Tupac: Resurrection is the way it follows Shakur's makeover from the middle class student at the Baltimore School of Arts who loved ballet and Van Gogh to the self-confessed "thug" who, at the height of his fame, was arrested for shooting two off-duty police officers and convicted of sexually assaulting a girl he met in a New York nightclub.
In Boogaloo, Kempton wrote that Shakur is the "black generation's James Dean", but now he says: I think it's broader than that, in some respects, he is the whole generation's James Dean. He is a poster boy pretty much all over the world. If you go to Romania, you'll find kids who have got his picture on their bedroom walls. He is a music star whose image established him as an iconic, rebel figure in the same way as James Dean emerged in the Fifties. But there was also a political dimension to Shakur's music that set him apart from most of his contemporaries. He was raised by Afeni Shakur, a single mother and leading Black Panther, who passed on her passion for radical politics and social issues. Shakur combined his political heritage with an ability to articulate the concerns of young men who felt alienated from mainstream society.
The recent figure Shakur most closely resembles is Kurt Cobain. At the start of the Nineties, two pop genres rap and grunge burst into the mainstream in the States. Cobain, the Nirvana singer who committed suicide in 1994, was the poster boy for white, suburban angst, an angry, unhappy star suspicious of the trappings brought by fame and wealth. Shakur's occasionally reflective lyrics, if not his behavior, could mirror Cobain.
He spent most of his last year holed up in a studio recording tracks. It was as if he knew that he didn't have long to live and he wanted to express everything he had inside him which could be released for years to come. This is the popular perception, masterminded by his mother, who controls the release of his apparently limitless back catalogue and sanctions the use of his image. Although, like many of the facts about Shakur's life, his prolific output could have a more prosaic explanation.
As the years roll on from his death, the real Shakur becomes harder to find. That just means the myth will keep growing.
