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Tupac Shakur gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame nearly 3 decades after his death

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More than 25 years after his death, Tupac Shakur received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Tupac Shakur, dressed in a suit, stared somberly from a blown-up photo that was erected on an easel like at a memorial service. But the mood along a Hollywood city block on Wednesday pulsed more as a party.
Family members, close friends and other rappers and collaborators hugged, laughed and exchanged memories atop a red carpet along a roadway closed off to traffic.
Pressing against steel barricades, a crowd of hundreds rapped his songs and chanted his name: “Tupac, Tupac, Tupac.” Street vendors hauled boxes from their vans filled with T-shirts bearing Shakur’s face.
Nearly 30 years after the 25-year-old’s death in 1996, the New York-born rapper, actor and activist — whose fame and influence only increased after his death — got his overdue Hollywood sendoff: a star on the Walk of Fame.
“Im feeling an over-elevated high, and I don’t even get high,” Shakur’s cousin Jamala Lesane told The Times after the ceremony, letting out an infectious cackle. “It’s just memories, the energy of all of this here, it’s just a great feeling.”
Nearby stood Shakur’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, who spoke and accepted the star on behalf of the artist. She remembered watching her brother when he was a teen performing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he had a role in a local production of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun.”
“Before anyone recognized his name,” Sekyiwa Shakur said during her speech, “he knew he had the dream to have his star up there on the Walk of Fame.”
While presenting Sekyiwa with the City Council resolution that declares June 7 Tupac Shakur Day, council member and Watts native Hugo Soto-Martinez spoke enthusiastically about his love for Shakur, saying the rapper’s music “literally kept me alive where I grew up — he was there in my darkest moments.”
Although Shakur moved frequently during his childhood, from Harlem to Baltimore, eventually landing in Marin County, Calif., it was Los Angeles where he put down roots as a recording artist. His music, which pulses with urgent political messages and tragic scenes of life in the low-income Black and brown neighborhoods of his youth and in Los Angeles, was rooted in West Coast hip-hop but exploded beyond the city. He sold more than 75 million records worldwide, with albums that went platinum and diamond. Artists in later generations, such as Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, have cited Shakur as a direct inspiration.

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