By Makosi Musambasi
Why, thirty years later, we are still trying to finish Tupac Shakur’s story
I have always had a ridiculous crush on Tupac Shakur.
There. I said it.
Never mind that the man has been dead for thirty years. Apparently, even death is no obstacle to my reticular activating system. Once my brain decided Tupac was interesting again, suddenly he was everywhere.
It started with the music.
Not even the words at first. The melody.
There is something about the melody in Tupac’s music that transports me. Do for Love can take me straight back to being 17. Not remind me of being 17. Take me there.
Music is extraordinary like that. Three notes and suddenly the body remembers a room, a feeling, a version of you that hasn’t existed for decades.
So I started listening again.
Then watching.
Then reading.
And somewhere between the cheekbones, the interviews and the music, I stopped looking at Tupac the rapper and started looking at Tupac the human being.
That is when his story became far more interesting to me.
Because Tupac Shakur was born into a story that had already begun before he arrived.
His mother, Afeni Shakur, had been incarcerated while pregnant with him and stood trial as part of the Panther 21 case. She was acquitted shortly before Tupac was born.
Think about that for a moment.
Before Tupac had taken his first breath, courts, incarceration, revolution, surveillance and the American criminal-justice system were already part of his inheritance.
Then came Mutulu Shakur, the man who became his stepfather and an important father figure in his childhood.
Mutulu was arrested in 1986, when Tupac was 15.
He would remain incarcerated for the entirety of Tupac’s adult life.
So while Tupac was becoming the young man the world would eventually know—acting, writing poetry, making records, becoming famous, becoming controversial, becoming wealthy, becoming wounded—one of the men who had helped raise him was experiencing those years from inside a prison.
Then Tupac himself went to prison.
In 1995, at the height of his growing fame, he was incarcerated following his conviction for sexual abuse, a conviction he continued to contest. He served approximately eight months before being released on bail while his appeal continued.
Less than a year later, he was dead.
Twenty-five years old.
And this is where I have begun to understand something about the world’s enduring obsession with Tupac.
We are obsessed with unfinished stories.
Most famous people eventually give us an ending.
They age.
They change.
They disappoint us.
They reinvent themselves.
They become parents and grandparents. They apologise for things. They double down on other things. Their politics evolve. Their faces change. Their music changes. Sometimes they become wiser. Sometimes they become caricatures of who they once were.
Time eventually introduces us to the person behind the mythology.
Tupac never had that opportunity.
He remains suspended at 25.
Beautiful. Angry. Brilliant. Contradictory. Reckless. Tender. Paranoid. Political. Poetic. Sometimes astonishingly perceptive and sometimes painfully young.
Forever becoming.
And perhaps that is the source of the fascination.
We don’t know who Tupac Shakur would have been at 35.
Or 45.
Or 55.
Would he have remained in music?
Would he have become a filmmaker?
Would his politics have matured?
Would he have reconciled with people he fought with?
Would he have become a father?
Would he have found peace?
Would he have returned to prison?
That last question has stayed with me.
Because once you trace the incarceration running through his family story, his own imprisonment and the unresolved legal circumstances surrounding the final period of his life, an uncomfortable thought emerges.
Not that prison was inevitable. Human lives aren’t equations, and none of us knows what Tupac would have done with another fifty years.
But incarceration had followed him from before birth.
And then, suddenly, death interrupted the trajectory.
Which is why, if I ever wrote a book about him, I already know what I would call it:
Destined for Behind Bars, but Escaped Through Death Instead.
I know.
It’s uncomfortable.
It is supposed to be.
Because I have never automatically understood death as the worst possible thing that can happen to a human being.
Death is devastating for those who remain. It creates absence. It leaves questions unanswered and conversations unfinished.
But death is also inevitable.
And in Tupac’s particular story, death did something extraordinary to his mythology.
It denied the world the ending it expected.
No long second prison sentence.
No middle-aged Tupac explaining the mistakes of 25-year-old Tupac.
No gradual disappearance from relevance.
No neat redemption arc.
No comfortable conclusion.
Just an abrupt full stop in the middle of a sentence.
And perhaps that is why we keep returning to him.
Because human beings hate unfinished sentences.
We instinctively want to complete them.
Thirty years later, people are still debating who Tupac really was, what he meant, who killed him, what he would have become, whether he was misunderstood, whether he was self-destructive, whether he was revolutionary, whether he was simply a frightened young man performing toughness because toughness was what his environment demanded.
Everyone writes their own ending.
But Tupac never gave us his.
And maybe that is the secret of his immortality.
He didn’t live long enough to become the man who used to be Tupac.
He died still becoming him.
And somewhere out there, apparently, is a woman listening to Do for Love, travelling back to herself at 17, developing an entirely unreasonable crush on a man who died 30 years ago and trying to work out how a story that ended thirty years ago can still feel unfinished.
Maybe that’s Tupac’s final trick.
He left us enough of the story to fall in love with him.
And not enough to ever stop wondering.
Makosi Musambasi is a media entrepreneur, talk show host , philanthropist and director of Sisters Keepers Foundation.She writes in her own capacity
