Tupac Shakur

America likes its artists the way it likes its superheroes: violent, tortured, and ripe for cinematic adaptation. It craves figures that are uniquely modern, yet imbued with timeless intangibles. They are supposed to be pinatas complex enough for academic over-analysis and simple enough for populist worship. 2pac is the most popular Emcee of all time, because he is all of those things: the artifice and self-mythologizing of Bob Dylan crossed with the radical politics of his godfather, Black Panther activist Geronimo Pratt; the implied danger and rambunctiousness of keith Richard's with the dorm-room-ready iconography of Che Guevara. He was the ideal figure for the Clinton Age telegenic, libidinous, and no one felt more pain. All too often, 2pac is described in terms of a false thug/angel dichotomy. But he was a warring mess of contradictions, a constitution consistent only in its rejection of inertia. He screamed West Side until he died, but once rapped under the name MC New York. His favorite album was Grip It! On That Other Level by Houston legends the Gheto Boys. He was raised in Baltimore, got his start in Oakland and died in Las Vegas, another sad casualty to the excess of the American Dream. He served jail time for sexual assault and shot an off-duty police officer. He was Johnny Cash by way of John Gotti, wearing a black bandanna and shrouding himself in a mixture of mob lore, Sun Tzu, Donald Goines, and Machiavelli. 2pac didn't change the game. He froze it in time and sculpted it to fit his image. Before him, Emcees were forced to come with a singular style. In his wake, many of them discarded that notion in a futile attempt to fill the void. 2pac died the victim of an unsolved crime a fitting ambiguity that has yielded a litany of surmises and speculation. Coupled with Biggie's murder the following year, his death forced Hip Hop music to confront its own shaky mortality. Suddenly, everyone understood the consequences and put aside their petty squabbles to "get this money."