Remember, we were coming off the First Gulf War, so there was a lot of money out there. POWELL: It was the era of prosperity in this country. YENIGUN: It was a year after the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the LAPD beating of Rodney King. Black people were pissed off but we wanted to party at the same time. SINGLETON: A record you could party too but then also has a sense of cultural resonance to it, in terms of that was that time, that was that moment. YENIGUN: Filmmaker John Singleton calls the follow-up to "Tupacalypse Now" the first real Tupac album. And he used that to forge a persona for himself. SINGLETON: He did have a whole lot of heart and soul about, in a sense, what I call cultural wealth of black people. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOLLA IF YA HEAR ME") And I felt like, since I lived that life, I can do that. ![]() I just wanted to never run out of material. ![]() And when I said that, I didn't know that I was going to tie myself down to just take all the blunts and the hits for the young black males in society, be like the media's kicking post for young black males, I didn't know that. I just wanted to rap about things that affected young black males. You know, and that was going to be my thing. : I started out saying that I was down for the young black male. Times writer Chuck Philips the following year, Tupac said he felt misunderstood. After a police officer was killed in Texas by a man who said he'd been listening to "Tupacalypse Now," the media came down hard. ![]() YENIGUN: The album was criticized for violent lyrics in some of the songs. He released his first solo album "Tupacalypse Now" in 1991. The family moved again to San Francisco Bay Area, where Tupac hooked up with the hip-hop group Digital Underground. He was born in New York City and his family moved to Baltimore when he was a teen, where, in addition to acting, he studied poetry, jazz and ballet at the Baltimore School for the Arts. YENIGUN: Tupac's Shakur started acting as a kid. YENIGUN: Before the year was out, Tupac and Singleton released "Poetic Justice." JOHN SINGLETON: My attitude was, I want to work with him, that's the dude I want to work with. YENIGUN: By 1993, filmmaker John Singleton had already put out the groundbreaking "Boyz in the Hood." He says when he saw Tupac on TV giving in an interview. YENIGUN: Vibe eventually did, so did radio and the record landed three songs on the charts. He already has one album out called "Tupacalypse Now," and he's in this really controversial hit film called "Juice." And he is someone we should be paying attention to. KEVIN POWELL: I explained to them, look, there's this young man who is the son of a Black Panther Party member, Afeni Shakur. Kevin Powell, a young journalist at Vibe magazine, was trying to talk his editors into taking a story. He was about to drop his second album and had just starred in his first feature film. SAMI YENIGUN, BYLINE: In January 1993, Tupac Shakur was 21 years old. ![]() The list includes a breakout album from one the most influential rappers ever to hold a microphone. The Wu-Tang Clan, Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah and more than a dozen other rap groups released albums that year. Well, now to a more recent moment in history, a year that helped change the sound of America, 1993.
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