A Thugz Mansion In Heaven’s Ghetto: Tupac Shakur—10 Years Gone

While it is fun to speculate as to whether or not he is really dead, today—September 13, 2006—marks the 10th anniversary of Tupac Amaru Shakur’s death.

Although for practically that entire decade I could have cared less about Tupac—believing his music said nothing to me about my life (to borrow from Morrissey)—I recently came to realize that his lyrics reflect a poetic truth about the human condition. In his music, conflicting emotions, values and beliefs collide in a fusion of rage, bravado, and compassion, yet flow out in terms that not only the mind understands, but the heart embraces. He was blessed with a distinctive voice, a prolific pen, an uncanny ear for rhythmic wiles, a perspicuous lyrical style that seamlessly blurred the line between reality and fiction, and profound insight into the interplay between his own desires, fears, joys, pain, anxieties, strife, triumphs, and failures, as well as those he could see in his community and society in general. Plus, the beatz is bangin’.

Despite his thug persona, Tupac’s oeuvre evinces an irrepressible artist’s sensitivity as much as it does a ruffian’s weary worldview, allowing others to understand his ambitionz az a ridah. We picture you rollin’, ‘Pac.

See also "If I Die 2Nite" (1996) — 2Pac.