In the course of writing “Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur,” an exhaustive chronicle for which he interviewed around 700 people, Jeff Pearlman came across a lot of things he knew Shakur’s fans wouldn’t like. For instance: A mere four months before the 1993 sexual assault charges that would ultimately land the hip-hop icon in prison, he was involved in a very similar case — essentially, an alleged gang rape — that was never prosecuted.
He also tracked down the EMT who attended to Shakur immediately after he was ambushed and shot as he entered Quad Studios in New York in 1994. The medic’s conclusion: The man with “Thug Life” tattooed across his stomach was indeed hit by enemy fire, but he also accidentally shot himself in the testicles.
Pearlman, a longtime sportswriter whose previous book subjects include Bo Jackson and the 1986 Mets (sorry, Red Sox fans), chose to spend three years of his life on Shakur largely because he loves his music. He was also drawn to the challenge of exploring the artist’s near-mythical status. But he wasn’t about to pull any punches. A dogged reporter and researcher, he felt compelled to go wherever the facts took him — even when those facts weren’t pretty.
“You have a decision to make when you write books like this,” Pearlman said from his Orange County home. “Who are you writing for? Am I writing it so his fans can feel better about Tupac? No, that’d be ridiculous. You’re writing it because you want to paint a full picture of a historic, culturally significant figure.”
The version of Shakur that emerges in this book — not to be confused with the 2023 Shakur estate-approved “Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,” by Staci Robinson — is a beguiling, paradoxical, infuriating, and ultimately tragic figure.
He was raised in New York, Baltimore, and Northern California by his mother, Afeni Shakur, a proud member of the Black Panther Party and a crack addict who had trouble keeping the lights on and food on the table. By many accounts, he was an effeminate and endlessly creative kid who had trouble fitting in. He was a slob who never learned to pick up after himself. He loved to get high and drunk and have sex with a great many women. He could write brilliant songs at a moment’s notice, and he rapped from somewhere deep in his stomach, with a desperate, feverish hunger, about everything from female empowerment (“Keep Ya Head Up”), to, well, thug life.
As he observed the street hustlers and gangbangers of Marin City, the rough Bay Area city where he moved as a teen in 1988, he wanted to embody them in song. And as he worked his way toward success and fame, as a recording artist and as an actor in movies including “Juice” (1992) and “Poetic Justice” (1993), the book documents how he made one violent mistake after another. A stray bullet fired by a member of his entourage killed a 6-year-old Marin City boy. With another entourage he beat down the director Allen Hughes after Hughes fired him for his behavior on the set of “Menace II Society”; that got him 15 days in jail. (Ironically, Hughes went on to direct the Shakur documentary series “Dear Mama.”) He had a lot of people telling him not to do self-destructive things. But he never had a responsible male role model growing up, and he never stopped acting impulsively.
There were too many incidents to count. The final one came Sept. 7, 1996, when Shakur, Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight, and their posse assaulted Orlando Anderson, a Crips gang member, at the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. Shakur was shot later that night outside Vegas; he died six days later. He was just 25 years old.
Between his posthumous image as a martyr and the endless conspiracy theories surrounding his unsolved murder (and that of friend-turned-rival the Notorious B.I.G. the following year), Shakur has been written about and talked about ad infinitum. Pearlman’s approach is so simple that it seems radical: talk to as many people as possible — family members, fellow rappers, old friends, EMTs — and create a portrait in full. Shakur deserves such treatment not because he was a saint (he definitely wasn’t), or a genius (he definitely was), but because he was very, very complicated.
Pearlman recalls speaking with former Boston Globe sportswriter Leigh Montville when Montville was writing his 2006 Babe Ruth biography, “The Big Bam.” Why, Pearlman asked, was Montville writing a Babe Ruth book when so many were already out there?
“Because,” Montville replied, “nobody has written my Babe Ruth book.”
Pearlman’s Shakur book is sympathetic but unsparing; it doesn’t burnish the myths so much as it tries to push past them. “Everyone thinks they own Tupac and his story,” Pearlman said. “They think because they’ve seen five of his videos they know what he was going through.”
In reality, what he was going through was often brutal. Pearlman spoke extensively with Shakur’s younger sister, Set, who was often left to fend for herself in Marin City while her brother sought a rep and a music career. He summarizes her appraisal of Shakur: “People think his life was joy. But he was in a lonely, sad situation and he was taken advantage of by one person after another his whole life.”
Pearlman agreed: “He didn’t die with much money, or many friends. He died with people asking him for [stuff] nonstop.”
That doesn’t really fit the standard heroic narrative. Then again, the truth rarely does.
ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
By Jeff Pearlman
Mariner, 446 pages, $32.50
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.