A Lost Recording Reveals Tupac Shakur aka 2PAC at 16
An extraordinary 1988 demo captures a 16-year-old Tupac Shakur years before his rise now heading to auction
Long before Tupac Shakur, the American rapper and singer considered widely as the greatest rapper of all time, became one of the most scrutinised and mythologised figures in modern music, he was a teenage MC recording rough demos in a friend's family home in Baltimore.
One of those recordings believed to be among the earliest surviving documents of his work has now surfaced as the centrepiece of a landmark auction hosted by Wax Poetics.
The cassette recorded in around 1988, captures a 16-year-old Shakur performing under the name MC New York alongside his early group, Born Busy and forms part of the GE-OLOGY Collection- an archive assembled by producer, artist and longtime friend Ge-ology, who has preserved the material privately for decades.
Biding that opened on 14 January for the cassettes, a handwritten later, a painting from his time in school and more will close on 11 February this year. Recorded at Ge-ology’s family home, the tape is raw and unpolished: Shakur delivers his verses a cappella, without the studio gloss that would later define his work. Yet it is precisely this informality that gives the recording its historical weight. It documents a moment before fame, before contracts, and before the expectations that would come to surround him — a snapshot of artistic formation rather than performance.
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Alongside the cassette, the auction includes a carefully curated selection of personal artefacts that collectively trace Shakur’s teenage years in Baltimore. Among them are handwritten lyrics that were never formally recorded, photographs of school events and backyard gatherings, and a signed graduation banner from a barbecue held in 1988 shortly before Ge-ology moved to New York City. Also included is a birthday invitation from 1986 belonging to Jada Pinkett, a reminder of the close-knit creative and social circles that surrounded Shakur in his youth.
Ge-ology has consistently resisted framing the collection as celebrity memorabilia. Instead, he positions it as a set of historical documents that capture the everyday reality of an artist still finding his voice. Reflecting on the demo, he has explained that the recording was never intended for release. “We were recording a cappellas so I could learn the rhymes and build the beats around them,” he said. “That tape is one of the earliest moments of Tupac being documented, before the world knew who he was.”
For Wax Poetics, the auction represents both a curatorial and cultural milestone. Alex Bruh, the company’s chief executive, described the collection as exceptionally rare not simply because of Shakur’s enduring stature, but because of its provenance. “When it comes to music collecting, it doesn’t get much bigger than Tupac,” he said. “The fact that these items come directly from his childhood friend, and from his pre-fame years, makes them even more significant.”
Shakur’s early life has often been flattened into a prelude to his later fame, yet this material complicates that narrative. It reveals a young artist embedded in community, experimenting with language and rhythm, and absorbing the social and political influences that would later define his work. In an era when hip-hop history is increasingly mediated through posthumous releases and algorithmic rediscovery, the collection offers something rarer: unvarnished context.
More than two decades after Shakur’s death, his image continues to circulate with extraordinary force reproduced, remixed and repackaged across popular culture. What makes the GE-OLOGY Collection notable is its resistance to spectacle.
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The auction remains live until 11 February, with collectors, institutions and fans now vying not just for ownership, but for stewardship of a formative chapter in hip-hop history — one recorded long before Tupac Shakur became a symbol, and while he was still, quite simply, a teenager with something to say.
Shakur’s early promise was ultimately cut short by violence. On 7 September 1996, he was shot multiple times in a drive-by attack while travelling in a car in Las Vegas, and died six days later at the age of 25.
The killing remains officially unsolved, a fact that has only deepened the mythology surrounding his life and work. That sense of unfinished possibility gives the material now coming to auction an added gravity: these recordings and fragments capture the origins of a global icon and the voice of an artist whose trajectory and whose life ended far too soon.