He was born on June 16, 1971, in the East Harlem section of Manhattan, but relocated to Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and then the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988. He moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to pursue his music career.

Although born Lesane Parish Crooks, he was renamed, at age one, after Túpac Amaru II, a revolutionary who was executed in Peru in 1781 after his failed uprising against Spanish rule. Shakur's mother explained, "I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood."

His parents, Afeni Shakur--born Alice Faye Williams in North Carolina--and his birth father, Billy Garland, were active Black Panther Party members in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A month before Shakur's birth, his mother was tried in New York City as part of the Panther 21 criminal trial. She was acquitted of over 150 charges.

At the Baltimore School of the Arts, Tupac studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet. He even played the role of the Mouse King in a school production of The Nutcracker.

At Baltimore's arts high school, Shakur met Jada Pinkett, who would inspire some of his poems. After his death, she would call him "one of my best friends. He was like a brother. It was beyond friendship for us. The type of relationship we had, you only get that once in a lifetime."

By the time he released his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, he had become a central figure in West Coast hip hop, introducing contemporary social issues that plagued inner cities to the genre at a time when gangsta rap was dominant.

While living in Oakland in 1991, Shakur was stopped by officers for jaywalking. He was asked for his ID, which he handed over. When the officers questioned his name, he exchanged words with them and was placed in a chokehold, slammed to the ground, stomped repeatedly, knocked unconscious, and arrested for "resisting arrest." Tupac's mother says this beating from the police changed him forever. In a 1994 interview, he admitted his rage: "As my video was debuting on MTV I was behind bars getting beat up by the police department. But nobody cared about that.... They did not see me on the news with my eye busted, my head busted, there's pictures of those but you don't see those pictures. You see pictures of Tupac coming out of jail."

Director Allen Hughes had cast Tupac as Sharif in the 1993 film Menace II Society, but replaced him once Tupac assaulted him on set due to a difference of opinion over the script. Nevertheless, in 2013, Hughes said that Tupac would have outshone the other actors, "because he was bigger than the movie."

"They got me trapped
Can barely walk the city streets
Without a cop harassing me, searching me
Then asking my identity
Hands up, throw me up against the wall
Didn't do a thing at all
I'm tellin' you one day these suckers gotta fall"

Thug Life released its only album, Thug Life: Volume 1, on October 11, 1994, which is certified Gold. It carries the single "Pour Out a Little Liquor", produced by Johnny "J" Jackson, who would also produce much of Shakur's album All Eyez on Me.