In September 1996, Tupac Shakur, the rapper and actor known professionally as 2Pac, was on top of the world.
His latest album, All Eyez on Me, was a multi-platinum smash with “How Do U Want It” / “California Love” topping the Billboard Hot 100 charts. He just finished shooting two new gritty crime films: Gridlock’d with Tim Roth and Gang Related, co-starring James Belushi and Dennis Quaid. And he already had a brand new album ready to go.
Sadly, he would never see it drop. On September 7, 1996, 2Pac was shot four times while in Las Vegas for the Bruce Seldon versus Mike Tyson fight. Seven days later, he succumbed to the gunshot wounds.
Only 25 when he died, 2Pac had some unfinished business, and not just his career. Over the past two years, 2Pac was in the middle of one of the most intense feuds in hip-hop history: unofficially known as the East Coast vs. West Coast beef.
2Pac had tension with several New York rappers, with the main subject being The Notorious B.I.G. and Sean “Diddy” Combs. While he addressed many of them on his scathing 1996 diss track, “Hit ‘Em Up,” it turns out he was just getting started. Full of venom and vitriol, obsessed with revenge and retribution, The Don Killuminati is 2Pac at his most extreme. The album is tight—only 12 songs—but you get every version of 2Pac. You get player Pac (“Toss It Up”), political Pac (“White Man’z World”), paranoid Pac (the melodic “Hail Mary”) and pensive Pac (“Krazy”). He even showed new pockets: built on moody acoustic guitar and liquid bass lines, “Me and My Girlfriend” is a love song dedicated to his gun. (Jay-Z and Beyoncé would famously make a more literalized version of the song in 2002.)
The album is menacing, ominous, and explosive. The Don Killuminati is the first of 2Pac’s seven posthumous albums. It carries the distinction of being the only one to have been completed in its entirety during Shakur’s lifetime and it shows. No other album released after his death had this much focus and thematic intentionality. (Songs recorded during this era like “Lost Souls,” “Friends,” and “Baby Don’t Cry (Keep Ya Head Up II)” would make to releases after Pac’s death.)
The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was released on November 5, 1996, and quickly reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 664,000 copies in its first week. By January, it had been certified double platinum and has since achieved quadruple platinum status.
The album is widely regarded as a certified classic, with a mystique surrounding it that’s still palpable today. Here are seven things you didn’t know about The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.
While incarcerated, 2Pac passed the time by reading a lot of books. One such book set the tone for The Don Killuminati: Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Machiavelli was a controversial political philosopher and theorist from the 16th century. The Prince was a treatise that offered ruthless advice to rulers on acquiring and maintaining power, emphasizing the effectiveness of cunning and manipulation over idealistic or moral governance.
This wealth of information was infused into the music. 2Pac helped birth an era when rappers began adopting names inspired by historical or political figures. While rappers at the time were using mafioso names—think Raekwon and Wu-Tang—2Pac took a more intellectual approach. He wanted his crew, called the Outlaws, to be named after enemies of the United States, meaning there were rappers in the crew with names like Kadafi, Mussolini, and Napoleon.
In September, just a couple of weeks before his death, Pac explained why he gave himself the name “Machiavelli” during an interview with VIBE. He said:
“That’s what got me here, my reading. It’s not like I idolize this one guy, Machiavelli. I idolize that type of thinking—where you do whatever’s necessary to achieve your goal.So now I’m not on no bullshit or anything; I’m gonna change the rules in this rap game. You know how, like, in politics, the Republicans are in power now? Well, I represent that style—I’m the new guy. I’m gonna shake up the whole Congress.”
There are still people on this Earth who believe Tupac is alive, hiding out somewhere in Cuba. The idea that Tupac faked his own death is probably hip-hop’s most famous conspiracy theories.
The rumors began almost instantly. Shortly after his death, Public Enemy leader Chuck D spoke with pioneering hip-hop journalist Davey D about the 2Pac shooting. He gave Davey 18 reasons why Pac might have still been alive. He pointed to the Jesus Christ imagery and the eerie “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” music video as potential clues to Tupac’s death being staged. One theory he floated was related to the idea that Machiavelli had also faked his own death. Problem is there’s no documented evidence to support this claim.
A Slate essay, published about a month after Pac’s death, suggested that Chuck might have been confusing Tupac with Grigori Rasputin, who survived multiple assassination attempts.
Regardless of the theory, for years, fans pointed to the “clues” in the Makaveli album as proof that the rapper didn’t really die.
2Pac’s All Eyez on Me was only out for five months before The Don Killuminati’s infancy began. “To Live and Die in L.A.” was recorded in July, but the remaining 11 songs on the album were recorded during a whirlwind seven-day record session, according to XXL.
The majority of the album was recorded during a three day day stretch in Can-Am Studios in Tarzana, California, with four days being dedicated to mixing and mastering. Entrenched with Death Row cast-off producers Big-D and Hurt-Em-Badd, 2Pac knocked out 20 tracks during the week-long session.
One interesting thing about The Don Killuminati is how different it is from All Eyez on Me. While the latter was a blockbuster, filled with club bangers and features from some of the biggest artists in the world at the time, like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Method Man, and Redman, Makaveli is much more street. The songs are less commercial, the producers are less established, and—except for Aaron Hall and K-Ci & JoJo—the features are more underground .
Apparently this was purposeful. Pac didn’t want this to be an actual album. In fact, he wanted to record the project, print up the CDs and release it himself. In a 2022 oral history of the album, Young Noble of the Outlawz told BET: “I remember him wanting it to be a mixtape… He just wanted to drop something to set the streets on fire and push the Outlawz before he got into whatever his next solo project was going to be.”
According to E.D.I. Mean, another member of the Outlawz, Death Row leader Suge Knight was the one who convinced him to make it an official album. E.D.I. explained: “Suge was like, ‘You still owe me an album. Let’s make some money off of this shit and not give it away for free.’”
2Pac and Quincy Jones’ family got off on the wrong foot. During a 1993 interview with The Source, Pac criticized Jones, saying, “All he does is stick his dick in white bitches and make fucked up kids.”
At the time, one of Jones’ daughters, Rashida, was 17 and interning at Warner Bros. She wrote a response in The Source, saying, “Where the hell would you be if Black people like him hadn’t paved the way for you to even have the opportunity to express yourself?”
Pac would later mend fences with the family, apologizing to Rashida and eventually dating Quincy’s other daughter, Kidada. Quincy later admitted he was initially unhappy with this arrangement, but he and Pac eventually spoke and squashed their differences.
One of the benefits of Pac getting close to the Jones family was his collaboration with Quincy’s son, producer Quincy Jones III (QDIII). Before working with 2Pac, QDIII had produced for artists like LL Cool J, YoYo, and Ice Cube. (He produced minor hits from Ice Cube’s Lethal Injection era, such as “You Know How We Do It” and “Bop Gun (One Nation).
After working with Pac on All Eyez on Me, QDIII played a significant role in the recording sessions for The Don Killuminati. He produced the album’s centerpiece single, “To Live and Die in L.A.,” as well as other tracks in Pac’s lore that would be released later in various forms, including “Friends” and “Thug Nature” (which originally interpolated Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”).
QDIII talked about what it was like recording with Pac during those sessions, telling BET:
“I would say he was manic…There would be moments that called for quiet voice and candles and all that and he would be screaming and smoking Newports. He was on fire with this manic push. He was always pushing.”
It took The Don Killuminati just over two years to sell four million copies, but the singles didn’t make much of an impact on American radio.
All three of the album’s singles—“Toss It Up,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” and “Hail Mary”—failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100, even after his death. This was surprising. Since the success of “I Get Around” in 1993—which peaked at No. 11 on the Hot 100—Pac had been a regular fixture on the singles charts.
In fact, earlier that same year, “How Do U Want It” / “California Love” spent consecutive weeks at No. 1. However, the singles fared much better overseas. In the UK, all three cracked the top 20 on the charts. Meanwhile, “Toss It Up” and “Hail Mary” both went gold in New Zealand.
2Pac was never one to shy away from controversy. On an album filled with violence, fury, and anger, one of the most striking elements was the front cover. The album art featured an illustration of 2Pac hanging from a crucifix, mimicking the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It was created by Compton native and Death Row’s in-house illustrator Ronald “Riskie” Brent, who was only 24 when he took on the assignment.
Understandably seen as a textbook example of sacrilege, 2Pac insisted that it wasn’t meant to offend Christians. In a 1996 interview with VIBE, 2Pac explained that the imagery on the cover was symbolic of the locations of his enemies: “My album cover is me on the cross being crucified, and the cross is the map. It’s got New York, Harlem, Brooklyn—everything. And I’m on the cross being crucified for keeping it real.”
Beef and the paranoia surrounding it are central themes of the album. The tension between 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. is well documented, and throughout the album, 2Pac airs out grievances with other New York rappers, including Mobb Deep, Nas, and Jay-Z. He bookends the album with tracks that diss them all by name: the fiery “Bomb First (My Second Reply)” and the intense “Against All Odds.”
Pac was clearly war-centered. The original artwork for the back of the CD featured even more shots at his enemies, including a graphic image of Dr. Dre. In an interview with Cracked, Riskie talked about the image saying:
“The original artwork had images I did of Biggie as a pig and Puffy as a ballerina because Pac was still at war with them. That all got taken out when it became a commercial project.”
