2. He’s the man who single-handedly transformed a common epithet for a criminal into a source of masculine strength.
After recording two albums – the muddled 2Pacalypse Now and the slightly improved Strictly 4 My . – Shakur unveiled his crew L.I.F.E., an acronym for The Hate U Gave Little Infants Everybody. At the time, it seemed like an unnecessary variation on the “gangster” trope that dominated West Coast rap at the time. However, his reimagining of a word that the Oxford Dictionary defines as “a violent person, especially a criminal” into an positive attribute resonated. 2Pac’s vision redefined the word “thug” into a man who triumphs over systemic and societal obstacles. By the end of 1994, Cleveland quintet B.O.N.E. Enterprises had renamed themselves Bone Thugs-N-Harmony; the word has been since been adopted by Young , Slim and too many others to mention.
