Kill Your Idols: Tupac Shakur

Tupac was a story teller. The moral and tone of one story didn't have to match up to the next one. It's like how could Ice-T do Cop Killer then play a cop on TV? Because it's a song and a TV show, not a signed pledge to a never-changing philosophy.

Those stories were important. As an adolescent living and working on a farm in Kansas in the 90s, hearing 2pac and Dre were about the only reasons I had any idea what inner-city life was like. So yeah, maybe we didn't have a clue what it was about, but that's why it was interesting. Tim McGraw singing about drinking beer on a dirt road was truer to my life, but I didn't need him to tell me what that was all about.

 

I'm pretty sure Ice-T just is a sellout.

 

Forget Kill Your Idols. Let's try Save Your Idols with Tupac. He doesn't get shot up at the MGM Grand, or he does but pulls through and is still with us in 2013. But in what form? Does he maintain the West Coast gangsta groove to the bitter end? Follow the Snoop Dogg/Lion path and become more mainstream? Serious actor like Ice T? Comedic actor like Ice Cube? Big time star actor like Will Smith? Poet, professor, professional activist? Does he crumple under the weight of fame and go into seclusion like Dave Chapelle? Or, for one reason or another, does he inevitably die young no matter what, like Kurt Cobain?

 

Maybe, but I'm not sure he ever personally endorsed killing cops, even if he did write a song about the idea. John Fogerty had never even been down South before all the Credence hits. You don't necessarily have to live it to write it.

 

Hail Mary is still tremendous.

 

That's part of why I started this thread. Shakur was talented beyond being 2Pac. I don't think he had the comic chops of Ice Cube. Maybe he did but didn't want to tear down his thug veneer the way Ice Cube did. He never could have become Will Smith, either, because he was never going to make everyone like him. He had burned enough bridges to ensure that in his five years of fame.

 

2Pac is tremendous in "Hail Mary." The beat is tremendous in "Hail Mary." The hook is all-time great in "Hail Mary." Then this line pops up: "They got a APB out on my thug family / Outlawz run these streets like these scandalous freaks." I can rap better than any member of the Outlawz. That is not an exaggeration.

 

As for what he would have done next, I could see later career 2pac as a cross between Jay-Z (mogul, but not as big at J) and Common (acting, but better than Common).

 

True. I just pulled it up and listened to it. I guess I usually just zone out during the second half of the song because that was even worse than I remember it.

 

Let's hope he never became commercialistic Ice Cube ...

... when once he was this:

 

Coincidentally, these were some of the working titles of "The Great Gatsby."

Small world.

 

I didn't understand a single thing on this thread until Dick posted. That was funny.