Tupac Shakur - California Love

Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971-1996), known by his stage names 2Pac (or simply Pac) and Makaveli, was an American rapper. Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on the East Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City. He was named after Túpac Amaru II, a Peruvian revolutionary who led an indigenous uprising against Spain and was subsequently executed. Shakur began his career as a roadie and backup dancer for the alternative hip hop group Digital Underground. His professional entertainment career began in the early 1990s, when he debuted his rapping skills (for Digital Underground) in a vocal turn in "Same Song" from the soundtrack to the 1991 film Nothing but Trouble. Shakur has sold over 75 million albums worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists in the world. In addition to his career as a top-selling rap artist, he was a promising actor, and a social activist. Most of Tupac's songs are about growing up amid violence and hardship in ghettos, racism, other social problems, and conflicts with other rappers during the East Coast – West Coast hip hop rivalry. Tupac had many legal issues throughout his life, but that didn't stop from his success. While serving a prison sentence he released Me Against the World, and is the only artist to ever have a number one album on the Billboard 200 while in prison. In September 1996, Shakur was shot four times in the Las Vegas metropolitan area of Nevada. He was taken to the University Medical Center, where he died of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.

Shakur's music and philosophy is rooted in many American, African-American, and World entities, including the Black Panther Party, Black nationalism, egalitarianism, and liberty. Shakur was a voracious reader. He was inspired by a wide variety of writers, including William Shakespeare, Niccolò Machiavelli, Donald Goines, Sun Tzu, Kurt Vonnegut, Mikhail Bakunin, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Khalil Gibran. Shakur's hit song "Dear Mama" is one of 25 songs that was added to the National Recording Registry in 2010. The Library of Congress has called "Dear Mama" "a moving and eloquent homage to both the murdered rapper's own mother and all mothers struggling to maintain a family in the face of addiction, poverty and societal indifference."

www.tasf.org

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