Tupac Shakur

An Argument Disguised as a Career

By the time Tupac Amaru Shakur was shot for the second time in his life, on the evening of September 7, 1996, in a car stopped at a red light on the Las Vegas Strip, he had already become something more complicated than a recording artist. He was twenty-five years old. He had released four solo studio albums, one of them recorded in the months before and after a prison sentence, another a double album that would go on to be certified diamond, the best-selling solo hip-hop album in American chart history at the time of its release. He had starred in five feature films. He had been shot, sued, arrested, convicted, incarcerated, and bailed out by the head of the most commercially dominant label in rap. He had given interviews in which he named, by inference if not always by name, the people he believed wanted him dead. And in the six days between the Las Vegas shooting and his death on September 13, the American press treated the event less as a homicide than as the expected conclusion of a story that had been building toward exactly this outcome for years.

This chapter is not a celebration of that story, and it is not an attempt to relitigate the unresolved criminal case that, three decades later, finally produced an indicted defendant. It is an attempt to explain, as a matter of historical record, how a child of Black Panther Party activists became the central commercial and symbolic figure of gangsta rap's national triumph, why his career generated such intense and often contradictory public meanings, and why his death functioned as a turning point not only for the East Coast–West Coast conflict described in the previous chapter but for the way the hip-hop industry, the press, and the public would come to understand the relationship between a rap artist's public persona and his life.

Shakur's career sits at the convergence of several historical currents already traced in this book: the political inheritance of Black Power-era radicalism discussed in earlier chapters on the Bronx's social conditions; the rise of gangsta rap and its West Coast commercial apparatus, embodied above all by Death Row Records; the escalating rivalry between Death Row and Bad Boy Entertainment described in Chapter 37; and the broader 1990s phenomenon, examined later in this book, by which hip-hop artists became simultaneously the most visible spokesmen for urban Black America and the most heavily surveilled and sensationalized figures in American popular culture. No single career makes all of these currents legible as clearly as his.

A Child of the Movement

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born Lesane Parish Crooks on June 16, 1971, in East Harlem, New York. His mother, Alice Faye Williams, had taken the name Afeni Shakur after joining the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. A little more than a month before her son's birth, Afeni Shakur had been acquitted, along with twelve co-defendants, in the case widely known as the Panther 21 trial, in which New York prosecutors had charged a group of Black Panther members with conspiracy to bomb police stations and department stores. She had represented herself for part of the proceedings while in custody and pregnant, and the acquittal of all defendants on every count was, for the Panther movement, a rare and significant legal vindication. Several weeks after the verdict, her son was born. She renamed him Tupac Amaru Shakur, after Túpac Amaru II, the eighteenth-century Peruvian revolutionary executed for leading an indigenous uprising against Spanish colonial rule, and after Shakur, the Arabic-derived surname meaning "thankful" that several members of her political circle had adopted.

This inheritance was not incidental biographical color. It shaped the household conditions of Shakur's childhood as directly as poverty did. His mother struggled with addiction during parts of his adolescence, and the family moved frequently, living for periods in New York City, in Baltimore, and eventually in the San Francisco Bay Area, often in conditions of significant financial insecurity even as Afeni Shakur worked to maintain the political commitments and intellectual seriousness that had defined her earlier life. Tupac was, by most accounts from teachers and childhood friends, an unusually articulate and socially engaged child, drawn to reading, performance, and political conversation well before he had any connection to hip-hop as a recording art form.

Baltimore and the School for the Arts

The most formative stretch of Shakur's adolescence took place in Baltimore, where his family relocated in the late 1980s and where he enrolled at the Baltimore School for the Arts, a public magnet school for students pursuing intensive training in theater, dance, music, and visual art. There he studied acting, ballet, and poetry, performed in Shakespeare productions, and developed close friendships with classmates who would later become prominent in entertainment, including the actress Jada Pinkett. Teachers and classmates from this period consistently described a student of real discipline and ambition, someone who took formal artistic training seriously rather than treating it as incidental to a future career in rap.

This biographical detail matters because it complicates a frequently repeated public narrative, both during Shakur's life and after his death, in which his artistic identity is treated as either purely a product of street experience or purely a performance constructed for commercial purposes. Neither framing accounts for the years he spent in formal arts education, where he was trained explicitly in the craft of dramatic performance, character voice, and poetic composition. The combination of this formal training with the political consciousness inherited from his family produced an artist whose verbal and performative instincts were, from the start, unusually wide-ranging, capable of registers that ran from tender vulnerability to aggressive bravado, often within the same verse.

Marin City and the Turn Toward Hip-Hop

In 1988, Shakur's family moved again, this time to Marin City, California, a small and economically depressed community north of San Francisco. The move placed him, for the first time, in close proximity to the West Coast hip-hop scene described in earlier chapters of this book, a scene then in the process of building the regional infrastructure, sound, and commercial networks that would make Los Angeles gangsta rap a dominant national force by the early 1990s. It was in the Bay Area, rather than in New York, that Shakur made his entry into hip-hop as a performer, finding his way into the orbit of the Oakland-based group Digital Underground, whose mixture of party music, theatrical persona, and loose political commentary offered him an initial professional foothold.

From Roadie to Lightning Rod

Digital Underground and the First Recordings

Shakur joined Digital Underground's touring organization around 1990, initially working as a dancer and roadie before earning credited appearances on the group's recordings, including a verse on their 1991 single "Same Song." Digital Underground's leader, Gregory "Shock G" Jacobs, recognized Shakur's verbal ability and stage presence and used the group's platform and recording connections to help him secure a solo deal with Interscope Records, then a newly formed label built in part around the commercial promise of West Coast rap. This apprenticeship gave Shakur something that mattered considerably for his subsequent career: professional studio experience, road-tested performance skills, and an industry relationship that translated quickly into a recording contract of his own.

His debut solo album, 2Pacalypse Now, was released in November 1991. Musically rooted in the politically engaged, sample-dense West Coast style of the period, the album addressed police violence, poverty, racial injustice, and teenage pregnancy with a directness that immediately distinguished Shakur from much of the gangsta rap then dominating West Coast sales charts. The album generated only modest commercial returns on its initial release, but it produced a controversy that would establish, only months into his recording career, the pattern that would define much of his public life: his work would be treated by segments of the political and media establishment as a direct cause of real-world violence.

The Quayle Controversy and the Pattern of Blame

In 1992, a Texas state trooper named Bill Davidson was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a nineteen-year-old named Ronald Ray Howard, who had been listening to 2Pacalypse Now in his car at the time of the stop. Howard's defense attorneys argued, unsuccessfully, that the album's lyrics about violence against police had influenced his actions. The case drew national attention when then–Vice President Dan Quayle publicly condemned the album, stating that it had no place in American society, a remark that placed Shakur, less than a year into his recording career, at the center of a national debate over rap lyrics, free expression, and the responsibility of artists for the actions of listeners. The controversy did little to slow his career and arguably accelerated it, giving him a level of public name recognition that a purely musical breakthrough would not yet have provided.

This episode established a template that would recur throughout the 1990s, in which Shakur's lyrics, his arrests, and his public statements were treated by much of the press less as separate events than as cumulative evidence in a single ongoing narrative about his character and his danger to the public order. The pattern was not unique to Shakur; it reflected a broader moral panic about gangsta rap that this book examines in earlier chapters on N.W.A and Ice-T. But Shakur, more than almost any other artist of the period, found himself cast simultaneously as the genre's most visible political conscience and its most visible threat, often within the coverage of a single news cycle.

The Acting Career and a Different Kind of Visibility

Shakur's formal theatrical training paid early professional dividends through a parallel acting career that, for a period in the early 1990s, ran alongside and arguably outpaced his recording career in critical regard. His breakout role came in 1992 with Juice, in which he played Bishop, a teenager whose escalating violence drives the film's plot; critics singled out his performance as the most compelling element of the film, and the role established him as a recognizable screen presence independent of his music. He followed this with a starring role opposite Janet Jackson in John Singleton's Poetic Justice (1993) and a leading role in the basketball drama Above the Rim (1994). Industry observers at the time frequently noted that Shakur's acting talent appeared, if anything, more conventionally marketable than his music, and some in Hollywood viewed him as a potential long-term leading man whose career might eventually move away from the recording industry altogether.

That trajectory, and the question of what direction his career might ultimately have taken, was foreclosed by the events of 1993 through 1996, years in which Shakur's legal troubles, his recording output, and his entanglement in the East Coast–West Coast conflict accumulated with a speed that left little room for the kind of long, deliberate career-building his acting success might otherwise have supported.

Escalating Legal Trouble, 1993 to 1994

In October 1993, Shakur was involved in a shooting in Atlanta in which two off-duty police officers were wounded; Shakur claimed the officers had been harassing a motorist and that he had acted in self-defense after one of the officers fired first, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped after evidence suggested the officers had been drinking and had initiated the confrontation. The episode did lasting damage to his public image regardless of its legal outcome, reinforcing a perception, amplified by selective press coverage, that he was a figure perpetually at the center of violent incidents.

A far more consequential legal matter began in November 1993, when a twenty-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson accused Shakur and several associates of sexual abuse following an encounter at a New York hotel. Shakur denied wrongdoing, and his defense maintained that the encounter was consensual; the case proceeded to trial over the following two years amid extensive press coverage. In December 1994, a jury convicted Shakur of first-degree sexual abuse, while acquitting him of the more serious charges of sodomy and weapons possession that had also been brought. He was sentenced in February 1995 to one and a half to four and a half years in prison. Shakur and his supporters continued to dispute the verdict publicly for the remainder of his life, and the case remains a subject of historical disagreement; what is not disputed is that the conviction, and the prison sentence that followed it, shaped the most commercially consequential period of his recording career.

The Quad Studios Shooting

On the night of November 30, 1994, the evening before he was due in a Manhattan courtroom to hear the verdict in the Ayanna Jackson case, Shakur was shot five times in the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in Times Square, where he had gone to record a guest verse. He was robbed of jewelry during the attack and survived, undergoing emergency surgery before appearing in court the following day in a wheelchair, bandaged, to hear the jury's verdict. The Notorious B.I.G., Sean "Puffy" Combs, and several other figures associated with Bad Boy Entertainment had been in the building that night, recording in another studio, a fact that Shakur would later cite publicly as grounds for his belief that people connected to Bad Boy had advance knowledge of the attack. Combs, Wallace, and their associates consistently and firmly denied any involvement or foreknowledge, and no evidence has ever conclusively established that anyone at Bad Boy was responsible for or aware of the shooting in advance. The episode nonetheless became, in Shakur's own public statements over the following two years, the foundational grievance of the East Coast–West Coast conflict detailed in the preceding chapter, transforming a still-unsolved act of violence into the organizing narrative of one of hip-hop's most damaging rivalries.

An unsolved shooting, recast as a public accusation, did more to organize the coast-to-coast conflict than any single song. Suspicion, once spoken from a stage with that much reach, behaves like evidence whether or not it ever becomes evidence in fact.

On the Quad Studios shooting and its aftermath

Me Against the World and Incarceration

Shakur began serving his sentence at Rikers Island before being transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, in early 1995. While he was incarcerated, Interscope released his third solo album, Me Against the World, in March 1995. The album, largely recorded before his imprisonment, was markedly more introspective than his earlier work, addressing mortality, paranoia, betrayal, and the psychological toll of his legal troubles with a candor that critics and listeners received as among the most emotionally direct work of his career. Me Against the World debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making Shakur the first artist in American chart history to have a number-one album while serving a prison sentence, a fact that the music press at the time treated as a remarkable, almost paradoxical demonstration of his commercial and artistic standing even as his liberty was entirely curtailed.

Suge Knight, Death Row, and Release on Bail

Shakur's imprisonment placed him, for the first time in his career, in a position of acute financial and legal vulnerability, his appeal unresolved and his ability to earn income sharply constrained. It was in this context that Marion "Suge" Knight, the chief executive of Death Row Records and a figure examined at length in the preceding chapters of this book, arranged to post Shakur's appeal bond, reported at roughly one point four million dollars, in October 1995, in exchange for Shakur's agreement to sign with Death Row and deliver several albums. The arrangement freed Shakur from prison after eleven months of incarceration, but it also bound him, both contractually and personally, to the label that had become the most commercially dominant and most aggressively combative organization in West Coast hip-hop, and to a label head whose business practices and personal volatility are documented extensively elsewhere in this book.

The decision reshaped the remainder of Shakur's career and, in the view of many who knew him at the time, accelerated his identification with exactly the kind of confrontational gangsta persona that his earlier work, with its explicit political content and emotional vulnerability, had only partially embraced. Whatever the underlying truth of his private intentions, the public Shakur who emerged from Clinton Correctional Facility in October 1995 was, within a matter of months, the most visible and the most aggressive voice in the conflict with Bad Boy Entertainment.

All Eyez on Me and Commercial Apex

In February 1996, Death Row released All Eyez on Me, a double album that became the commercial high point of Shakur's career and one of the defining commercial statements of Death Row Records at the peak of its national dominance. The album combined the G-funk production style associated with Dr. Dre and his collaborators, discussed in earlier chapters on the West Coast mainstream, with Shakur's now fully developed dual register of celebratory bravado and reflective vulnerability. All Eyez on Me sold in extraordinary volume, eventually becoming the first hip-hop album certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America for shipments exceeding ten million units, and it cemented Shakur's status as the most commercially powerful solo artist in rap at that moment.

"Hit 'Em Up" and the Point of No Return

The same year produced the single most consequential act of public escalation in the entire East Coast–West Coast conflict: the release, in June 1996, of the song "Hit 'Em Up," in which Shakur directed an unusually explicit and personal verbal assault at the Notorious B.I.G., Sean Combs, Mobb Deep, and several other East Coast figures, including an unsubstantiated claim regarding an affair with Wallace's wife, the singer Faith Evans, which Evans publicly and repeatedly denied. The recording is examined in greater detail in the previous chapter for its role in transforming a regional business rivalry into a campaign of public, personalized hostility; in the context of Shakur's own biography, it represents the furthest point of his transformation from the introspective, politically engaged artist of 2Pacalypse Now and Me Against the World into a performer whose public identity had become almost entirely organized around conflict, retribution, and the demonstration of dominance. Industry figures and journalists who covered hip-hop at the time, along with members of Shakur's own circle, later described mounting concern, expressed privately to him during this period, that the level of public hostility he had committed to was placing him in genuine physical danger.

September 1996

On the evening of September 7, 1996, Shakur attended the Mike Tyson versus Bruce Seldon heavyweight boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas as a guest of Suge Knight. In the hotel lobby after the fight, members of Knight's entourage identified Orlando Anderson, a young man from a rival Compton gang, in connection with an earlier altercation involving the theft of a Death Row medallion from one of Knight's associates months prior. A brawl broke out in the lobby, captured partially on hotel security footage, in which Shakur and members of Knight's circle assaulted Anderson. Hours later, while Shakur rode in a BMW driven by Knight toward a Death Row-affiliated nightclub, a white Cadillac pulled alongside the vehicle at a red light on Las Vegas Boulevard, and a gunman fired multiple shots into the car. Shakur was struck several times. Knight, who was driving, suffered a minor injury from bullet fragments. Shakur was taken to University Medical Center in critical condition and died six days later, on September 13, 1996, at the age of twenty-five, after undergoing multiple surgeries and ultimately succumbing to internal injuries and respiratory failure.

The killing was never solved during the years immediately following Shakur's death, despite an investigation by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department that drew on eyewitness accounts, forensic evidence, and the public statements of figures connected to the rival gang associated with Anderson, who was himself killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998 without ever having been charged. The case became, for more than two decades, one of the most prominent unsolved homicides in American popular culture, generating extensive journalistic investigation, multiple documentary treatments, and a body of public speculation that ranged from credible reconstructions grounded in witness testimony to conspiracy theories asserting that Shakur had staged his own death and was living in hiding, a claim with no credible evidentiary basis that nonetheless circulated widely in the years after his death and remains, to a diminishing degree, part of his cultural mythology.

The six days between the shooting and Shakur's death were covered by national media with an intensity that reflected his stature at the time: simultaneously the best-selling solo artist in hip-hop, a convicted felon recently released on bail, a film actor with a substantial independent following, and the most outspoken combatant in a rivalry that had already, weeks earlier, generated open warnings from people inside the industry that someone was likely to be killed. His death did not end the East Coast–West Coast conflict immediately, and the following chapter examines the killing of the Notorious B.I.G. six months later, an event that brought the rivalry to a second, even more consequential conclusion. But Shakur's death marked the moment at which the conflict stopped being treated, even by its most committed participants, as a matter of regional pride or commercial competition, and became instead a matter of mortal consequence that the industry could no longer fully rationalize or contain.

People Who Shaped the Story

Shakur's career cannot be understood in isolation. It was shaped at every stage by a small number of figures whose decisions, relationships, and public statements directly influenced the trajectory of his life and the meaning later assigned to his death.

What the Career Revealed

Shakur's significance to hip-hop history is not reducible to his record sales, substantial as they were, nor to the tragedy of his death, consequential as that event proved to be for the culture's subsequent self-understanding. His career matters historically because it made visible, with unusual clarity, a set of tensions that had been building within hip-hop throughout the gangsta rap era examined in the preceding chapters of this book: the tension between the artist as political voice and the artist as commercial product; the tension between authentic street narrative and constructed celebrity persona; and the tension between an industry that profited enormously from the marketing of danger and the real human cost that danger periodically extracted from the people who embodied it on record.

Artist and Commercial Asset

No artist of the period demonstrated more starkly how thoroughly a major label could absorb and monetize an individual's legal and personal crisis. Me Against the World reached number one while its creator sat in a New York state prison; All Eyez on Me became hip-hop's first diamond-certified album within months of his release on a label whose business model depended substantially on the public perception of danger and confrontation that Shakur's biography, by 1996, supplied in abundance. This is not to suggest that Shakur was merely a passive instrument of Death Row's commercial strategy. The record of his interviews, his political statements, and the introspective material on his earlier albums makes clear that he retained, throughout this period, ambitions and convictions that extended well beyond the persona Death Row marketed. But the commercial machinery around him was, by any reasonable accounting, structured to benefit from precisely the volatility that ultimately contributed to his death, a structural fact that the hip-hop industry would be forced to reckon with, however incompletely, in the years that followed.

The Politics of Contradiction

Shakur's lyrical and public persona contained genuine contradictions that critics, scholars, and fans have continued to debate since his death. The same artist who recorded "Brenda's Got a Baby" and "Dear Mama," songs widely regarded as among the most empathetic and socially conscious in 1990s hip-hop, also recorded material celebrating violence and material directed with calculated cruelty at specific named rivals. Some commentators have read this range as evidence of an artist of unusual emotional and intellectual breadth, capable of holding multiple truths about his own experience simultaneously. Others have read it as evidence of an artist whose public identity was never fully his own to control, shaped as much by label demands, by the gangsta rap marketplace described in earlier chapters, and by the genuine dangers of his environment as by any unified artistic vision. Both readings have scholarly defenders, and this chapter does not attempt to resolve the disagreement; it notes instead that the disagreement itself, sustained for three decades after his death, is part of what made Shakur's career historically significant. Few artists in American popular music have generated such persistent and serious critical disagreement about the basic question of who they were.

He was marketed as a danger to be consumed and remembered as a conscience to be honored, and the gap between those two images was never closed. It became, instead, the subject most people actually wanted to talk about.

On the divided critical legacy of Tupac Shakur

Press Coverage and the Mechanics of Moral Panic

Shakur's career is also historically significant as a case study in how mainstream American media covered rap-associated violence in the 1990s. From the Dan Quayle controversy in 1992 through the extensive coverage of his death in 1996, journalists frequently treated his arrests, lyrics, and eventual killing as confirmatory evidence of a single coherent narrative about gangsta rap's inherent danger, a framing that tended to collapse the distinction between an artist's recorded persona and his actual conduct, and that rarely extended comparable scrutiny to the broader social and economic conditions, examined throughout this book, that shaped the environments gangsta rap depicted. This pattern of coverage did not originate with Shakur, and it did not end with him, but his case became one of the most prominent and most studied instances of it, cited frequently in subsequent academic and journalistic examinations of how the press covered Black popular culture during this period.

The Catalog After Death

Shakur's death did not end his recording career in any commercial sense. Death Row released The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory in November 1996, under the alias Makaveli, two months after his death, an album whose dark, urgent tone and rapid release fueled some of the earliest speculation that Shakur had anticipated his own killing or staged his death entirely. Over the following decade, Shakur's estate and various labels released a series of posthumous albums compiled from unreleased recordings, including R U Still Down? (Remember Me) in 1997, Until the End of Time in 2001, and several further collections, making him, by some measures, one of the most commercially active recording artists of the early 2000s despite having been dead for years. This posthumous productivity, more extensive and more commercially significant than that of almost any other artist in popular music history, became itself a subject of critical and ethical debate, raising questions about authorial control, the use of unfinished or rejected material, and the extent to which a posthumous catalog could be said to represent the artist's own creative intentions.

Institutional Recognition

Over the decades following his death, Shakur's standing within American cultural institutions shifted from controversial outsider to recognized historical figure. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, one of the earlier hip-hop artists to receive that recognition, a development that would have been difficult to imagine amid the moral panic that had greeted his early albums. University courses, museum exhibitions, and academic monographs have since treated his lyrics, his political inheritance, and his public persona as serious objects of historical and literary study, part of a broader process of hip-hop canon formation that this book examines at length in its later chapters.

The Unresolved Case

For more than a quarter century, the absence of any criminal conviction in Shakur's killing left his death suspended in a particular kind of cultural limbo, simultaneously a settled historical fact and an open question. The 2023 arrest of Duane "Keffe D" Davis represented the first formal criminal proceeding directly addressing the killing, built substantially on Davis's own public statements made across years of interviews and a published account of his alleged involvement. As detailed earlier in this chapter, that case remains pending as of this writing, with a trial date set for August 2026. Whatever its outcome, the prosecution itself marks a significant moment in the long historical afterlife of Shakur's death, transforming an event long treated primarily as cultural mythology into, once again, an active matter of criminal law.

Myth, Memory, and the Limits of Biography

The persistent rumors that Shakur faked his death, still circulated in some corners of popular culture decades later, deserve mention here not because they carry evidentiary weight, which they do not, but because their durability says something about the particular kind of cultural figure he became. Few American musicians have generated comparable conspiracy theories about their own survival. The phenomenon reflects, at least in part, the genuine difficulty audiences and critics have had reconciling the scale of his talent and the apparent acceleration of his ambitions, evident in the volume and range of his unreleased recordings, with the abruptness of his death at twenty-five. The myth of survival is, in this sense, less a serious historical claim than a symptom of unresolved grief and unfinished narrative, the natural by-product of a career that was still visibly expanding in scope and ambition at the moment it was cut short.

What is not in dispute is the scale of his influence on the artists who followed him. His combination of political seriousness, emotional candor, and commercial aggression became a template that subsequent generations of rappers, across regional and stylistic lines, would draw on explicitly, and his catalog remains among the most frequently cited reference points in hip-hop's internal conversation about what the art form is capable of expressing. The chapters that follow in this book, particularly those addressing canon formation and the politics of authenticity in Part XII, return repeatedly to Shakur's career as a central case study in how the culture has negotiated the relationship between an artist's life, an artist's death, and the meaning later audiences assign to both.

Conclusion

This chapter has traced Tupac Shakur's career from his birth into a family directly shaped by the surveillance and prosecution of Black radical politics in the early 1970s, through a childhood of formal artistic training and chronic instability, into a recording and acting career that made him, by the mid-1990s, simultaneously the most commercially successful solo artist in hip-hop and the most visible casualty of the conflict examined in the preceding chapter. His career illustrates, more clearly than perhaps any other in this period, how thoroughly an individual artist's legal troubles, political inheritance, and commercial value could become entangled with one another inside the hip-hop industry of the 1990s, and how the press, the public, and the industry itself struggled to separate the recorded persona from the living person whose choices, relationships, and ultimately whose death were shaped by forces well beyond his lyrics alone.

The chapter that follows turns to the Notorious B.I.G., whose career, commercial rise, and killing six months after Shakur's ran on a closely parallel track, and whose death would bring the East Coast–West Coast conflict to a second and, for the industry, even more sobering conclusion. Read together, these two chapters are best understood not as a story about two individual rivals but as a single historical episode: the moment at which hip-hop's commercial ascent, regional competition, and embrace of violent narrative converged with consequences the culture could no longer treat as merely promotional.