Makaveli at 30: the album 2Pac finished in a week

On 5 November 1996, Death Row and Interscope released The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. The name on the cover wasn't 2Pac. It was Makaveli. Tupac Shakur had been dead for less than two months, and the record most fans simply call Makaveli became the first album released after his death.

August 1996Made in one week

The album came together at speed. By most accounts it was written, recorded and mixed in about a week in August 1996. You can hear the hurry in it. It's darker and angrier than All Eyez on Me, the double album he'd put out that February.

These were some of the last songs he ever recorded. On 7 September 1996 he was shot in Las Vegas, and he died six days later, on 13 September. He was 25.

The nameWhy Makaveli

The alias came from Niccolò Machiavelli, the 16th-century Italian philosopher who wrote The Prince, a book about power and how to hold on to it. For an artist who had spent 1996 in the middle of hip-hop's East Coast–West Coast feud, the choice said a lot about where his head was.

The cover went further. It shows Pac painted on a cross. A line printed across the bottom reads: “In no way is this portrait an expression of disrespect for Jesus Christ.”

The releaseBrought forward

The album wasn't meant to come out in 1996 at all. It was planned for March 1997. After Pac's death, Death Row moved the release up by several months, to 5 November.

Three singles carried it: “Toss It Up”, “To Live & Die in L.A.” and “Hail Mary”.

The numbersStraight in at No. 1

Fans showed up for it. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 664,000 copies in its first week. With All Eyez on Me having also topped the chart that February, it gave Pac two No. 1 albums in the same year. By 1999 Makaveli had been certified four times Platinum in the United States.

Thirty years onStill the last word

More albums followed after his death, but those were put together from recordings in the archive. Makaveli is the only posthumous 2Pac album he finished himself, and that's why, for a lot of fans, this is the real last 2Pac album.

Thirty years later, it still sounds like what it was: a man in a hurry, saying everything he had left to say.