If a spectral presence in a do-rag bothers you in forthcoming days, don't be alarmed. It'll just be the ghost of Tupac Shakur, nipping back to earth to mark the September 13 anniversary of his death. Indeed, this time round it's a full 10 years since the sainted 'Pac was shot where he sat in the back of a limo near the Vegas strip with characterful label boss Suge Knight wedged in beside him.
Chances are that if he does drop by he won't stay long - this is not a man given to spending the afterlife unproductively. If, while breathing, he was a leading light of the most hysterically morbid era in rap history, in death he's been elevated to gangsta People's Princess, a lost prophet destined to unite warring peoples and fill the iPods of numberless French exchange students.
And at the heart of that achievement has been a release schedule frantic enough to shame more animated rivals. Since his demise, the Pacman has released five albums of "new" material (a sixth is due later this year), two greatest hits collections, and two live albums; he's contributed to three soundtracks, and had his name attached to two volumes of his poetry, read by a clutch of rap notables and Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover. Eighteen singles have been issued in Britain alone, most recently last year's Ghetto Gospel, in which an unclaimed vocal track was gussied up with a weepy cameo from Elton John, the results displacing Crazy Frog at No 1.
Such has been his workrate that posthumous nervous exhaustion seems inevitable. Through the combination of busy estate lawyers and a vault full of unreleased throat-clearings, Tupac's greatest legacy has turned out not to be his music, but his transformation of death itself from professional full stop to mere semi-colon. The songs have been terrible - but the songs haven't been the point. Instead, his undead success has been down to an expert milking of the messianic postures he struck in life - and, of course, the mystery of his shooting, its suspects including the CIA, Notorious BIG, various Crips and Cindy Beale.
There are also those who believe it was all a hoax carried out by the apparent victim to escape the pressures of fame. But the real question of where he might be now had he survived is limited to the theoretical.
And the answers are, as so often, mundane. He would, by now, be into the hinterlands of his mid-30s. He would be fatter. He may have traded in the do-rag. As a musician, he would have found himself consigned to the revered but obsolete ranks of "rap royalty" alongside De La Soul and Public Enemy (the career equivalent of a wizened grandad mumbling to himself at a wedding party). Acting may have provided a getaway; there would have been a hood comedy, an action movie; later, perhaps, a guest spot on Will And Grace.
All that seems certain is that he would have made fewer albums. And when you realise that, that's when you break down and ask: Oh, Lord, why did you take him from us?
