"Tupac Shakur wasn't always the cool, stylish and tough figure who came to define 1990s hip-hop. As a teenager, he was awkward and eccentric. He wore braces over his gapped, slightly brown teeth and walked like a duck, exhibiting a self-conscious swagger that made him stand out for all the wrong reasons. "When people give too much grandeur to his thoughts and his behavior, both negative and positive, actually, I would say you have to remember, he was a baby, like he was a baby," Pearlman said."
""One day Tupac does a rap battle in Marin City in front of a bunch of people, and there's a 13-year-old rapper named Tac. And Tac just demolishes him. And Tupac is devastated," Pearlman said. Tupac disappeared for several days after the battle. During his short-lived hiatus, he shadowed a local gangster for inspiration. Tupac studied how he walked, talked and thought, and when he returned to Striplin's house, he wrote "Days of a Criminal," a song about life as a California gang banger."
""The song is awesome," Pearlman said. "And that was Tupac getting his butt kicked and realizing, 'I can't just rap about my thoughts. I have to rap about what I see and what is going on around me.' And that was the moment, sort of a really key moment, for Tupac." In that moment, Tupac had found the formula for his music and discovered the persona that he wanted to embody."
Tupac Shakur matured from an awkward, eccentric teenager with braces and a self-conscious gait into a decisive musical force. Early humiliation in a rap battle drove him to disappear briefly, study a local gangster's mannerisms and adopt new material grounded in observation. He wrote "Days of a Criminal" about life as a California gang banger and realized the necessity of rapping about what he saw around him rather than only his inner thoughts. That shift produced a durable persona and a formula for turning hardship and devastation into compelling music and artistic identity.
Read at Kqed
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