Word: shakur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...famous definition of hip-hop as the black CNN, bringing the news from the streets is itself a rebel dispatch. (Eminem does the same for the white underclass, when he manages to get past his fixations on his mom, Everlast and boy bands.) And the undying Tupac Shakur--named for a revolutionary and tied, through his mother and musical executor, to the Black Panther movement--is a far more political figure than his lyric sheets suggest. But popular hip-hop, P.-Diddy-all-about-the-Benjamins-style, tends to be more like the black E! channel, celebrating money and fame...
...morbidly fascinating, if paradoxical, that a pop star would shine brighter in the dark abyss of death than in the daylight of life. The late rapper Tupac Shakur is no exception to the rule [SHOW BUSINESS, April 16]. Like the work of fellow musicians Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison--who were all cut down in their prime yet are still selling big some 30 years later--Tupac's music undoubtedly will be sold, purchased and heard for many generations to come. Why? Partly because he was one heck of an artist and partly because of the secrets that...
...center of all things Tupac is his mother Afeni Shakur, 54, a former imprisoned Black Panther who has transformed herself into hard-nosed keeper of the flame, hiring advisers to watch over her son's legacy but calling the shots herself. After a court battle, Afeni won control of Tupac's master tapes, worth millions of dollars. (The court also ruled that Death Row--the label to which Tupac was signed at his death--is entitled to a cut of the proceeds from recordings he made under contract...
Afeni, who admits to having struggled with crack as Shakur's career blossomed, has devoted herself to the business of turning her son's death into a message of redemption. She has plenty of material to work with. Shakur was a prolific artist who in life released four albums, made six films and wrote more than 100 poems. He also left behind hours of unreleased tapes. Using earnings from his earlier albums, Afeni created a new record label--Amaru (Tupac Amaru is an Incan name meaning Shining Serpent)--endowed a foundation and opened a performing-arts camp in Stone Mountain...
Until the End of Time, drawn from a fertile period of Shakur's life--1995 and early 1996--shows that his mother knows how to choose wisely. The CDs are packed with his resonant, staccato rapping and poignant subject matter. Letter 2 My Unborn (Shakur left no children), eerie in its prescience about dying childless, is the sort of work that will nourish his mystique. Says poet Nikki Giovanni, who has studied Shakur extensively: "There's an old Nigerian proverb: You're not dead until you're forgotten." By that measure, Tupac lives...