Tupac Shakur wasn’t always the cool, stylish and tough figure who came to define 1990s hip-hop. As a teenager, he was awkward and eccentric. He wore braces over his gapped, slightly brown teeth and walked like a duck, exhibiting a self-conscious swagger that made him stand out for all the wrong reasons.

But even then, Shakur was magnetic and drew people in — a charm that, as writer Jeff Pearlman argues in his book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur, helps explain the contradictions that shaped Shakur’s short, extraordinary life.

“When people give too much grandeur to his thoughts and his behavior, both negative and positive, actually, I would say you have to remember, he was a baby, like he was a baby,” Pearlman said.

Shakur was 19 years old when he began working o

See Full Page