album #98

all eyez on me (2 pac)

[I listened to this album and wrote most of this review in '09, so I'm counting it as the last of my '09 albums.]

This is one of the longest albums I've listened to this year, and it's in a genre, Gangsta Rap, that just isn't my thing. For what it is, it's pretty good. Some of the tracks are boring but for the most part, a lot of great, hard, well produced beats. Tupac has a great voice, low and confident.

Basically I can grade every song on two axes… (1) the lushness of the beat (2) the introspection or intelligence of the lyrics. I've read/heard before that Tupac allegedly is the 'socially conscious' rapper, a poet of the streets, but so much of this record is just cocky, bombastic thug-life aggression. And he's good at it, it's not inherently dislikable, but I'm more moved and more intrigued when he gets more reflective, it interests me more. For instance, “I aint mad atcha” is really interesting because lyrically, he's basically talking to people who rejected the path he's on and he's saying, 'hey, I understand that too.' “Tradin War Stories” is probably my favorite of his aggressively straightforward, I'm a thug gangsta raps- great beat, smart lyrics, harsh and forceful. “Cant C Me” is up there too- damn! such a heavy, harsh beat. The songs I find most dislikable and skippable are those with lazier or less remarkable beats, united with drearily predictable, 'I'm a badass thug' lyrics. Some of the songs that I love for the beats, with okay lyrics- “All About U,” “Skandalouz,” “How Do U Want It.” Some of the songs that I didn't really care for the beats, but the lyrics are pretty striking and would deserve a reexamination: “Life Goes On,” “Only God Can Judge Me,” and “Wonda Why They Call U Bytch.”

Tracks like “Shorty Wanna Be A Thug” are really ambiguous to me, I can't tell if he's lamenting or celebrating little kids going down that same dark path.

An interesting difference between Rock and Hip Hop, as far as I can tell, is their different opinion of money. In rock, it seems like material wealth is a sign of clownishness, of selling out, but in hip hop, even when this is music that is loudly pronouncing the struggles on the streets, enormous amounts of money seems to legitimize the artist rather than the opposite; bragging about the enormous sums of money being made is like, 'they made good.'

Anyway, a huge-ass album, rife with opinions, and overall it's obviously a good example of what it is, but what it is, a gangsta rap album, is not a thing I'm particularly in love with. Nas and Biggie are better by my grade. I'll need to hear some of Tupac's more intellectually and socially challenging work to change that opinion; that said, I look forward to hearing it.