‘He never stopped being hurt’: Tupac Shakur and the women who shaped him

All eyes on me: Tupac Shakur, photographed for ‘Poetic Justice’ in 1993 (Eli Reed/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock)

This June, when Tupac Shakur belatedly received his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, a crowd of hundreds turned out for the occasion. Pressing up against steel barricades, they rapped his songs and chanted his name. Almost three decades after his death, Shakur still feels powerfully alive. He was a star for just five years, from the release of debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991 to his death in 1996 at just 25 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, for which nobody was charged until a few months ago. Despite the brevity of his time in the spotlight Shakur released four albums – three of which went platinum – and appeared in six films. That work – and the 75 million record sales that followed – have ensured a kind of immortality. It’s no coincidence Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg brought him back as a hologram for Coachella a decade ago. Apparently untroubled by death, Shakur has always stayed relevant.

While Shakur may now be an icon to millions, when Staci Robinson first met him he was just an incredibly confident 17-year-old with a notepad full of ideas. They attended the same high school, a few years apart, and Robinson went on to become a novelist and screenwriter. They kept in touch, with Shakur inviting Robinson to join a scriptwriting group he was planning to put together out of a desire to create female characters with authentic perspectives and voices. The first meeting was scheduled for 10 September 1996, three days after Shakur was shot and fatally wounded.

A few years later Shakur’s mother Afeni, who died in 2016, asked Robinson to write a book about her son. After months of interviews with those who knew him best the project was put on hold, where it remained until Robinson’s involvement in last year’s museum exhibit Wake Me When I’m Free and this year’s documentary miniseries Dear Mama. As with those projects, her newly published Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography takes Shakur off his pedestal as one of the greatest rappers of all time and instead lets us see him as a mother’s son, shaped first by Afeni’s revolutionary politics and then often again by the women he spent time with.