When Tupac Shakur was fatally shot at age 25 on Sept. 7, 1996, the presidential race between incumbent Bill Clinton and Bob Dole was in its stretch run. The Atlanta Olympics had just ended. The internet was in its infancy.
In a booming music business, CDs were king, like Shakur's monumental “All Eyez on Me," which topped the Billboard album chart a few months earlier. It was the pinnacle of a brief hip-hop career whose legend would only grow in the following decades. His shooting was one of several momentous mid-1990s musical deaths, including those of Kurt Cobain and Shakur's archrival the Notorious B.I.G.
