The "pose" was a recurring theme in Tupac's life and work. He had been required to maintain the pose and he did not regret doing so, but it was a pose nonetheless, and one he was abdicating." "His gangsta-rapping had been a pose, he said. " was liberated from the demands of his music" by prison, Bruck wrote. The " gift" of isolation, in other words, granted him an artistic clarity he hadn't known before. To fans and critics alike, the duress generated by the rapper's impending prison sentence and the eight months he spent behind bars birthed what many consider his musical masterpieces: Me Against the World (1995), the epic that introduced a more reflective and confessional Tupac, recorded just before he was locked up and All Eyez on Me (1996), the sprawling, ambitious follow-up album that cemented his legacy. "Outside, he drank heavily and smoked marijuana constantly. "In the very beginning, prison granted Tupac a sort of grace, extricating him from the manic, overcharged existence he had created for himself," journalist Connie Bruck wrote in The New Yorker. He found the latter in an unexpected place: the Clinton Correctional Facility, a hellish maximum-security prison in upstate New York. He'd just survived being shot, his life was in a tailspin and the only way out seemed to be death or total isolation. For Tupac Shakur, who died 20 years ago Tuesday, the months he spent incarcerated were both personally and professionally transformative.
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