Headline : Tupac’s Legacy as a Complicated Trailblazer Remembered as the Rapper-Actor Receives Hollywood Walk of Fame Honor

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On April 15, 2012, 2Pac made his debut appearance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. At this point, it had been 16 years since Tupac Amaru Shakur had been murdered on the streets of Las Vegas at the age of 25. And yet there he was onstage, his holographic likeness projected with uncanny vividness alongside his onetime collaborators and labelmates Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, whom he now appeared to be speaking to and trading bars with in front of an audience of 80,000.

As the first performance of its kind, the 2Pac hologram became national news, and sparked worries that a wave of holo-tours, featuring ghostly apparitions of long dead stars, would soon be filling festival grounds and amphitheaters. Aside from a few one-offs, however, this did not come to pass. And yet the 2Pac hologram still felt significant for a different reason. After a decade and a half of vault-clearing posthumous releases, books, documentaries, statues, shout-outs in hundreds of hip-hop songs, and murals in virtually every American city from the Bay Area and back down, Shakur’s iconography had long seemed at risk of swallowing the brilliant, infuriating, inspiring, complicated man himself, leaving only a depthless shadow behind. 

Shakur is hardly the first generational superstar to see his legend come to overshadow his life and work after death, but few have made for such an awkward fit into the narrow, two-dimensional confines of icon-hood. Unquestionably one of the most significant artists of the late 20th century, Shakur was both a sensitive poet and a volatile provocateur. A liberatory prophet and an agent of chaos. A figure of conscience and empathy with a propensity for violence and self-sabotage. To reduce him to only one set of those attributes was to misunderstand what made him so special—few American icons make less sense as a simplified, sanitized symbol.

And yet, as the years go by and the veterans of hip-hop’s most important and tumultuous era settle into middle age, it feels as though his legacy is coming into sharper, more complete focus. Earlier this year, Allen Hughes’ FX  docuseries “Dear Mama” offered a far-reaching study of Shakur’s life by focusing on his relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur (herself a trailblazing figure of the Black liberation movement whose life would have been documentary-worthy even if her son had been a chiropractor). There are now courses dedicated to 2Pac in more than one college, and the growing library of Shakur studies offers plenty of space to explore the more obscure corners of his life and work. He’s already a Rock Hall inductee, and only the third rapper to have a song included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. And on June 7, Tupac Shakur will add another important notch to his legacy when he finally receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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