Life after death

They were right.

With last week's opening of "Tupac: Resurrection," a motion picture documentary narrated by the slain rapper, Tupac has reappeared in theaters near you. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack album and coffee-table tome that sets Tupac's poetry and memoirs alongside glossy photos.

Seven years after his death, Tupac is also back, so to speak, in venues likely and unlikely. The focus of a course called "The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur" at the University of Washington, he's also the subject of numerous biographies, fan tributes and highbrow volumes (from "Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur" by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, to indie press titles like "Tupac and Elvis: Inevitably Restless").

And of course, Tupac, who's in the Top 10 of Forbes.com's list of highest-earning dead celebrities, is as alive as ever, musically speaking. The best-selling rap artist of all time, he's sold more records posthumously than he did in 25 years of life, according to the movie.

"The title 'icon' is bandied about all the time, but Tupac is one of the few who actually deserves it," says Lauren Lazin, the director of "Tupac: Resurrection."

Why? What gives Tupac's legacy -- pervasive, lucrative, steeped in conspiracy theories and urban myth -- a life of its own?

Few offer answers -- or dramatize the fascination -- like a Tupac fan who spent time in the rapper's skin, in a manner of speaking: Tom Sanford, an Ivy League-educated artist and self-described "white kid from the suburbs," expressed his reverence by turning himself into Tupac.

The transformation was, he admits, "stupid and superficial." Sanford lost 30 pounds, acquired Tupac's picture-perfect physique, drank quarts of Hennessy, and got one of the rapper's tattoos ("2Pac") on his chest.

But his recent experiment, documented in a Web log that garnered more than 2,000 hits a day, clearly touched a nerve.

"Tupac was a gangster, see -- but then again no, he wasn't. He got out of the ghetto but constantly went back in," Sanford says, standing in his Brooklyn gallery before his massive painting of Tupac's murder, which has all the religious gravitas of Leonardo's "The Last Supper."