"Keep ya head up, ooh, child Things are gonna get easier"

-- from Keep Ya Head Up

His mother Afeni was pregnant with him while on trial, and he was born in East Harlem in 1971, into a world that gave him nothing to hold onto except ideas. The family moved often, and at thirteen he found the Baltimore School for the Arts, where poetry, theater, and ballet gave structure to his restlessness and where he began performing Shakespeare. The West Coast called in his teens, and he joined Digital Underground as a dancer and roadie before stepping forward as a solo artist. 2Pacalypse Now, his 1991 debut, was a political statement that got him denounced by a sitting vice president and beloved by a generation that felt the same rage.

He refused to be one thing. The same man who wrote Brenda's Got a Baby about teenage poverty also recorded All Eyez on Me, a sprawling double album of celebration and excess that became one of the best-selling rap records of all time. He acted in Juice and Poetic Justice, wrote poetry that filled books published after his death, and recorded at a pace that left hundreds of unreleased songs in the vault. He was sentenced for assault, survived a shooting, and went to jail, and every chapter fed the legend and the music.

He lived in public, loudly, with no filter, and the mess and the brilliance were inseparable. That is exactly how he wanted it.

His mother Afeni was pregnant with him while on trial, and he was born in East Harlem in 1971, into a world that gave him nothing to hold onto except ideas. The family moved often, and at thirteen he found the Baltimore School for the Arts, where poetry, theater, and ballet gave structure to his restlessness and where he began performing Shakespeare. The West Coast called in his teens, and he joined Digital Underground as a dancer and roadie before stepping forward as a solo artist. 2Pacalypse Now, his 1991 debut, was a political statement that got him denounced by a sitting vice president and beloved by a generation that felt the same rage.

He refused to be one thing. The same man who wrote Brenda's Got a Baby about teenage poverty also recorded All Eyez on Me, a sprawling double album of celebration and excess that became one of the best-selling rap records of all time. He acted in Juice and Poetic Justice, wrote poetry that filled books published after his death, and recorded at a pace that left hundreds of unreleased songs in the vault. He was sentenced for assault, survived a shooting, and went to jail, and every chapter fed the legend and the music. He lived in public, loudly, with no filter, and the mess and the brilliance were inseparable. That is exactly how he wanted it.

He was shot in Las Vegas in September 1996 and died at twenty-five, six days after the drive-by. The questions about who ordered it and why have never been answered, and the mystery became part of the mythology. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, the first solo hip-hop artist honored in his first year of eligibility, and his lyrics are studied in classrooms and quoted by athletes and poets. He was the thug and the prophet, the party and the protest, the anger and the tenderness, all in constant motion. He told us to keep our heads up, and a quarter century later we are still listening.

Sources: Hotsupper research, Wikipedia, 2pac.com, KUTX (All Eyez on Me retrospective), Wikidata