"Me against the world..." Tupac Shakur became hip-hop's first martyr in September 1996, when he was killed in an as-yet-unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. It was an ending the troubled rapper had long predicted. Indeed, in between serving prison time for sexual assault and surviving a gangland shooting — on top of a steady string of run-ins with the law — the gangsta rapper had become the point man in a deadly rivalry between his West Coast record label Death Row and Puffy Combs's Bad Boy Entertainment in New York. The Bad Boy rapper Notorious B.I.G., whom Tupac had declared his mortal enemy, was slain outside an industry party in L.A. two months later.

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