original me against the world album cover

Institutional racism, drug addiction, and trauma had affected him since childhood.

Tupac Shakur was a thoughtful, introspective person, but he was also a wild young man who never truly got an opportunity to mature. But if those layers seemed like contradictions, they weren't so hard to figure out. The same man who bemoaned the evils of street violence would also bark out gun-talk threats and would eventually die by gun violence. At the time, critics would marvel that the same rapper who made tender, heartfelt odes to women-'Dear Mama,' 'Keep Ya Head Up'-would also rage about the scandalous skeezers in his life and would, in fact, to go jail for sexual assault. Tupac Shakur's complexity wasn't so complex. People who'd never heard a 2Pac song would have opinions about the things happening in the man's life. In the last years of his life, America's daily newspapers would breathlessly recount the latest details of Shakur's various trials and resentments and alliances. Everything important that would happen in rap music in the next few years would somehow relate back to Tupac Shakur, even after his own death. Whether by design or through a lurid and unpredictable sequence of events, Tupac Shakur was rap's protagonist by the time he released 1995's Me Against The World, his third album. A few months later, Shakur was in prison, but he also had the #1 album in America. Sitting in that wheelchair, Shakur learned that he'd been convicted of sexual assault, and a judge sentenced him to between 18 months and four and a half years in prison. Shakur always angrily insisted that he was innocent, that they'd merely had consensual sex. A year earlier, a woman had accused Shakur and two other men of raping her in a hotel room. The next day, Shakur sat in a New York courtroom in a wheelchair. Against doctors' orders, he checked himself out just a few hours after getting out of surgery. When Shakur resisted, the gunmen shot him five times. In the studio's lobby, three gunmen beat and robbed Shakur and the two men he had with him. In November of 1994, Tupac Amaru Shakur was on his way into Manhattan's Quad Studios to record a guest verse.

Original me against the world album cover