Tupac
We don’t really need to explain this one to you, but we’re going to anyway: Tupac, also known as 2pac and Makaveli, began his rise to fame in the early 1990s with his debut in Digital Underground’s track, “Same Song”. Following the positive response, he released his first solo album: 1991’s politically-charged 2pocalypse Now. The album, which received a lot of praise for its relevance (and, unfortunately, it probably will for quite some time), features songs about racism, poverty, black-on-black crime, and most famously, police brutality. Like all good work, it wasn’t without its controversy– following the death of a state trooper, then-vice president Dan Quayle said that a record like 2pocalypse Now was dangerous, and that had no place in modern-day society. Despite the thumbs-down from the vice president, Tupac’s debut album was certified gold and has sold nearly a million copies in the United States.
Tupac was the first of his kind, and the inspiration for every other rapper who began work in the nineties. He released a total of four studio albums, which all did fairly well on the charts (and by ‘fairly well,’ we mean they went platinum), and amassed a group of loyal followers. Today, he’s still cited as a big chunk of the generation’s favorite rapper. He also starred in a handful of movies, including Poetic Justice and Gridlock’d.
We know that all good things must come to an end, but we never predicted the end of Tupac’s career. In Las Vegas in 1996, Tupac received multiple gunshot wounds and died six days later. Nearly 20 years later, his murder is still unsolved, though many people claim to know who killed him and why.
There have been several posthumous studio albums, including Until The End of Time, Better Dayz, Loyal to the Game, and 2006’s Pac’s Life. There have also been countless documentaries and biographical films covering his early life, his career, and of course, the events surrounding his untimely death. We don’t have the numbers on how many T-shirts have been sold with his likeness on them, but we’re sure it makes up a big chunk of the economy.
