He just expressed his worldview so vividly and compellingly that it left imprints that have yet to fade. never broke up?).īut I do think 2Pac’s existence is extraordinary because he managed to be so impactful without being an elite rapper (from a technical standpoint, that is).
#2pac me against the world album stream full
It’s impossible to come across anything definitive in a genre full of what-ifs (what if Big L lived? What if N.W.A. What would those two have had to say in their 30s? Their 40s? Would their presence have influenced even more MCs, or would they have made some of them unnecessary? Would we have grabbed on to Nas and Talib the way we do if we still had Pac and Biggie?īrian Josephs (BJ): I mean, to attempt to answer those questions would be like grasping at straws. I often wonder what the current state of hip-hop would be if we’d gotten more albums from him and 2Pac that weren’t just posthumous releases. In 2Pac’s case, it’s especially impressive considering how little time he had for hindsight.įunny that I’m writing this on the 18th anniversary of the Notorious B.I.G.’s passing. But very few can talk about what that life does to your spirit, your mindset, and to the people who care about you. Any rapper can talk about the “Thug Life” - it’s the perspective of youth talking there. But I’d say the wise and introspective nature of Me Against the World made him sound like more of a tough guy than anything on the middle-fingers-up All Eyez on Me. It made him wise, but it also made him more reckless than even your dumbest 25-year-old. At the risk of generalizing The Young, most people around that age are painfully self-centered, with no real sense of self-awareness - yet here’s 2Pac opening “Dear Mama” with “When I was young, me and my mama had beef/ Seventeen years old, kicked out on the streets.”Ī lot had happened to 2Pac in those few years between getting kicked out of his mama’s house and the release of this album. I don’t know what you were doing when you were 25, but I know what I was up to, and it wasn’t writing lyrics of this kind of depth. It really puts his work and, to an even larger extent, his words into perspective. Jill Hopkins (JH): Until you’d mentioned it, I’d forgotten that Pac was only 25 when he was killed. What do you guys think? Where does Me Against the World fit in 2Pac’s discography? Without Me Against the World, his legacy as it stands today wouldn’t so strongly emphasize his humility. That’s no complaint, though, because 2Pac didn’t need to show every side of himself at once. It’s an album that’s short on hardcore rap appeal, and I like to think that if you were to listen to Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me without knowing for sure when one ends and the next begins, it’d be easy to tell that “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”, All Eyez’s menacing opener, starts a new chapter. Right off the bat, the intro (a stream of news clips about his legal ordeals) and “If I Die 2Nite” paint him as troubled, a crucial development given that he was in prison at the time. Still, I think Me Against the World is the album that most quickly and cleanly gets to the heart of who 2Pac was as a man - and not just because it’s half as long as his other masterpiece, 1996’s All Eyez on Me. It’s easiest to look at his achievements as one vast sum, just to nod and say, yes, 2Pac was everything to hip-hop and maybe more. The impact he had on his genre, if not pop culture as a whole, extends to this day. Though he was often dubbed a gangsta rapper, he excelled at everything from gentle introspection to incisive social commentary to (yes) unrepentant tough talk. He was killed at 25, but he recorded so much music that you could believe he lived another decade. Hip-hop has arguably never seen a more complex, conflicted rapper, and seemingly all of him made it on record at some point. Michael Madden (MM): There’s something daunting about having to write at length about a single 2Pac album, to risk focusing too much on just one body of work. In light of its 20th anniversary, Consequence of Sound’s M ichael Madden, Jill Hopkins, Brian Josephs, and Will Hagle revisit the album to discuss where it fits in 2Pac’s discography and just how influential it’s been in the two decades since its release. It became his first full-length to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. 2Pac’s third album, Me Against the World, was released on March 14th, 1995, while the rapper served a prison sentence for sexual abuse.
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