Remembering Tupac; he would have been 45 today

Tupac Shakur — one of the most popular, if not most important, rappers ever — would have turned 45 years old today, June 16, 2016.

Alternately known as 2Pac, Shakur was born on June 16, 1971, in New York, and rose to fame in the 1990s. He got his start with the group Digital Underground, but as a solo artist, he reached incredible heights, including two No. 1 albums — Me Against the World in 1995 and 1996's All Eyez on Me. 

All Eyez, in particular, became a staple of any respectable hip-hop fan's collection; the double album sold more than 5 million copies in the USA.Writing about the male African-American experience — with stark scenes detailing lives plagued by poverty and violence — Tupac became a modern street poet and a cultural icon. Along with contemporaries NWA, Snoop Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac helped to transform rap and hip-hop into a mature art form by relating emotionally to listeners with brutally honest accounts of their struggles, while educating a broader swath of America to the realities of urban society.

Tupac's musical stardom led to opportunities in feature films. He was cast in a handful of movies, the most prominent being a lead role opposite Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice.

Sadly, Tupac's life was cut short when he was shot in Las Vegas in September 1996. More albums of his music have been released posthumously, and his iconic status has only grown in the eyes of music fans.

Patrick Foster and Jim Lenahan, USA TODA