2Pac

Tupac Amaru Shakur, 2Pac, was born in New York City in 1971 to parents who were members of the Black Panther Party, raised by his mother, Afeni Shakur, and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988. After a stint with Digital Underground, his 1991 debut, 2Pacalypse Now, put him at the center of West Coast hip-hop with political lyrics about injustice and the marginalization of Black Americans. Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z... and Me Against the World pushed him further, the latter a brooding, confessional record from a man who sounded like he was running out of time.

In November 1994 he took five bullets at a New York recording studio, and he then spent eight months behind bars on sexual abuse charges before his release pending appeal in 1995. He signed straight to Death Row, and the result was All Eyez on Me, hip-hop's first double album, a swaggering, G-funk-soaked blowout that ditched introspection for menace. "California Love" and "How Do U Want It" both went to number one on the Hot 100, and "Ambitionz Az a Ridah" snarled with the same menace.

He was shot in a drive-by in Paradise, Nevada, on September 7, 1996, and died six days later. The records kept coming, and so did the honors: more than 75 million sold, the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, in his first year of eligibility.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.