The life and work of rap pioneer Tupac Shakur, put in context by a noted cultural critic
-- Shakur died in September 1996 from wounds suffered in a shooting off the Las Vegas Strip
-- Shakur's fourth solo album, "All Eyez on Me", debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's album chart and has sold 6 million copies to date

Tupac Shakur has been deified as a Renaissance man in gangsta rags. This son of a Black Panther activist was equally at home on movie screens and music stages, playing prominent roles in Juice and Poetic Justice and putting West Coast rap on the musical map as part of the seminal hiphop group Digital Underground. Shakur's greatest commercial success came when he went solo. Paralleling his fame were a series of court and jail appearances and physical attacks on the rapper that ended when he was gunned down on a Las Vegas street.

Controversial critic Armond White tries to make sense of Shakur's life and death in Rebel for the Hell of It, the first full-length biography of the rapper. He details each crucial step in Shakur's development — from his early exposure to racism and strategies of resistance, to his study of drama "in preparation for a life of projecting and romanticizing", to his move from New York to the West Coast and innovative work with early hiphop culture and music.

This is far from a simple fan book, however. White looks at larger issues of rap and ghetto culture, exploitation by the music industry, self-destructiveness, and the black struggle for self-expression, a struggle that, in the author's eyes, the self-deluded Tupac failed to further.

Includes discography (p. 209-211), filmography (p. 211), and index.