On April 15, 2012, 2Pac made his debut appearance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. At this point, it had been 16 years since Tupac Amaru Shakur had been murdered on the streets of…
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His style was always far too slippery to pigeonhole. He rapped with the cadences of a minister, equally comfortable with Gospel-style homilies or Old Testament brimstone, both righteous and otherwise. As a lyricist he was at home in a variety of registers, from the most plainspoken narratives and straightforward rhyme schemes, to dizzying explosions of alliteration and splatterpaint abstraction.
It was also 2Pac’s first No. 1 album, although that accomplishment came with a major asterisk: by the time it was released, Shakur was in prison, recovering from five gunshot wounds. Indeed, the year preceding its release had been a period of almost unbelievable turmoil, encompassing Shakur’s shooting at New York’s Quad Studios and no less than three arrests, the most serious leading to a conviction for sexual abuse.
And this was the image of 2Pac that persisted in the weeks following his still unsolved murder. It might have even remained so, had he not left a frankly astonishing amount of unreleased and unfinished material behind, which would gradually reveal even more shades of his ever-mutable personality. Tracks like “Hail Mary” and “Me and My Girlfriend” from his first posthumously released album would become gangsta rap holy scripture.
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