At around 15, Allegria Di’lecarta found her style icon. Her teenage friends did not quite understand her new obsession. The icon — plastered on posters all over her room, his face emblazoned on her T-shirts — had famously been dead for decades.
But Di’lecarta didn’t care. She took a deep dive into his music and declared that Tupac Shakur was it for her.
Now 20 and living in East London, Di’lecarta keeps visual reminders of the artist, who will be forever 25; in a TikTok video celebrating her adoration for the rapper, she flaunts a phone case with an image of Tupac hugging his longtime friend Jada Pinkett Smith, and a backpack sporting a collage of Tupac faces.
Di’lecarta said she often wears her Tupac backpack “so people know what I’m on.”
In 2023, Shakur’s face and name lives on in the public consciousness, especially as Gen Z replicates the ‘90s aesthetic. The rapper and actor, who was killed in 1996, was posthumously honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The city of Oakland, California, renamed a stretch of MacArthur Boulevard to Tupac Shakur Way to honor its famed resident.
But most notably, in September Las Vegas prosecutors arrested and charged Duane “Keffe D” Davis in connection with Shakur’s murder, finally yielding some answers in a decades-old homicide. As Davis’ case unfolds, Tupac’s influence and relevance in Black culture has remained as influential as it was at the peak of his career. This, experts and fans say, stems from his lyrics’ seeming timelessness, with his words about racism, police brutality, poverty and Black pride resonating with new generations.
The way Shakur remarked on these and other social ills was “particularly poignant and remarkable,” said Barbod Salimi, a scholar who taught a class called “The Prophetic Witness of Tupac Shakur” at Boston University.
His…
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