Tupac Shakur

He's twenty-five years old when the bullets find him in Las Vegas. Tupac Amaru Shakur — son of a Black Panther, child of poverty, ballet student turned thug poet, the most contradictory man in American music. He has already released more songs than most artists release in a lifetime, and the vaults will keep releasing them for decades after he's gone.

He grows up moving between Harlem, Baltimore, and Marin City — broke, brilliant, beautiful. He reads Machiavelli and Maya Angelou. He writes poetry in notebooks and rage into rhymes. He becomes the voice of a generation that no one else was listening to.

He is impossible to pin down. Gangsta and gentle, prophet and provocateur, dead at twenty-five and somehow still the loudest voice in the room. He left behind a discography, a film career, and a question every artist after him has had to answer: what are you willing to die for?