Kill Your Idols: Tupac Shakur

My guess is you can rap better than most rappers.

 

Multi-talented hologram ...

 

I can't decide if that's a compliment, even a tongue-in-cheek one.

 

Biggie Smalls and Junior Mafia some mark ass bitches.

Jake and Vers touched on the main thing that I've always admired about Pac, and it's one of the things I most like about Eminem: He was a storyteller who chose to embody various characters to explore different points of view.

One reason why so much of mainstream rap criticism is so fricken terrible is that so many music critics have a difficult time grasping the idea that not every song reflects the POV of the artist, nor does it mean the artist is endorsing the song's message. 2pac obviously enjoyed wearing different hats, and I think some of that was because he was conflicted as person, but some of it was also because he was creatively feeling his way through the world. It takes a pretty beautiful (and complex) mind to write "Keep Ya Head Up," which might not be a particularly great song lyrically, but probably one of the most progressive songs in the history of hip hop, and then turn around and write "I Get Around." He could play the wise poet of the ghetto, tell black women he wishes men would stop disrespecting them, then turn around and play the young horndog looking to hit it and quit it. And he might not have been either of those "characters," he just wanted to channel that idea when he sat down with a pencil and notebook.

I mean, has any popular rapper since 2Pac ever addressed the crippling cycle of single mothers and absentee fathers as honestly and fearlessly as he did? I mean, you could almost play "Keep Ya Head Up" at the Republican National Convention. In his early 20s, he was juggling complicated topics that Jay-Z still hasn't ever really found the stones to tackle, and even though he drifted away from that to chase commercial success, there was still elements of it that remained in his music.

Some of his rhyme structure still blows me away. Even stuff like "Dear Mama," which seems very basic when you first hear it, but you listen to it several times and you begin to marvel at how it loops back and how he's rhyming not only off the down beat, but off what seem like random asides.

And who'd a think in elementary
Heeeeey/I'd see the penitentiary
One daaaaaay!/Running from the police/(That's right!)
Mama catch me put a whooping to my backside

I think had he lived, he would have definitely done more acting, and likely achieved mainstream success/acceptance. the guy had as much charisma as any rapper ever. It would have been fascinating to see if he'd have occasionally gotten political. Not politics, mind you, but political. He obviously thought deeply about a lot big issues. I can see him being both a supporter and a critic of President Obama, when I think about it.

I think what's fascinating is that almost every great rapper there is today, you can trace back part of what makes them great and say: Yup, 2Pac did that. He could brag and boast like Jay-Z, he was fearless and discussed his insecurities like Kanye, he was as smart and socially conscious as Nas, he was funny and inhabited different POVs like Eminem, he was a poon-hound rogue like Lil Wayne, and he could think outside the box like Andre 3000.

I hate the hologram shit. I guess one could argue it potentially exposes 2Pac to a generation that never got the chance to see him perform, but it seems to crass and crude and so "Dr. Dre is looking to get paid."

I always thought this whole line of thinking...

White kids don't know what the fuck any of this music is all about, and they're just a bunch of wanna be paper thugs.


... was a little too simplistic. Did suburban angst take hip hop mainstream and make a lot of people rich? Yeah, probably. And maybe a lot of those kids bumping Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z didn't have a freaking clue what any of it was really about. But ask Jake said above, some white kids certainly did understand the deeper truths 2Pac was exploring. Whether it was 15 percent or less is sort of irrelevant. I bet a lot more soft, middle class white kids from two parent homes who listened to 2Pac in high school "got it" on a deeper level than "got" what Fitzgerald was saying in The Great Gatsby. I don't listen to him a ton anymore, but when I do hear it now, I have a much greater appreciation for the artist and thinker he was.

 

Tupac, Dr. Dre and other (most?) "gangsta" rappers, I think, *were* just characters and storytellers of a genre.

So that's where I approach my explanation of "Bitch" compared with his other songs.

Like a true showman, Tupac was an entertainer. He found a niche and took it to the extreme.

 

Double Down, my only qualm with your post was praising his rhyme schemes. He used easy and often single-syllable rhymes that never played well to the underground crowd. Granted, I'm not sure 2Pac was ever trying to win over Aceyalone fans. But compared to Nas or Biggie, he kept things relatively simple aside from his love of alliteration, which was pretty unique at the time.

And Songbird, Dr. Dre was a story reader.

 

Fair, but I think for the time he was playing with structure in an interesting way. In no way could he do shit like Common or Em or Nas or Biggie anyone who really figured out how to deconstruct the way you can put lyrics together. But he wasn't 50 Cent or The Game either.

 

Ooooooh you bout to get popped.

 

Dre became "gangsta" but started as a showman with a sweet smile:



Funny what wardrobe and a good scowl can do.

And again, Tupac blossomed as a showman of theatre:

"After completing his second year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he transferred to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet. He performed in Shakespeare plays, and in the role of the Mouse King in The Nutcracker.[15]"

He grew up around militant newsmakers -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur -- but it makes you wonder how and where Shakespeare ended and "thug life" began.

 

I view 2Pac as rap's Bruce Springsteen, minus the longevity. He told stories from all sorts of perspectives about the people he saw around him. He took on characters sometimes, went from the third person in others. He won't go down as a particularly complex lyricist, but he will go down as a great one anyway. He struggled with maintaining quality while crossing into pop. He sometimes let his less-talented friends (or, in Springsteen's case, wife) hinder otherwise great songs. And we loved him for those failings as much as his successes because he was the everyman. He wore his heart on his sleeve and opened up to us in ways others didn't or couldn't.

 

Could have maybe begun in those 13 years he spent in Harlem when mom was addicted off and on to crack.

 

That was part of his upbringing, sure, but he was lucky enough to go places in high school that allowed him to come of age as a showman performing the classics. Only years later did he choose "thug life" when it was time to become rich and famous. Circumstances of his upbringing probably made the transition easier.

I'm trying to image Tupac as a 14-year-old in 1985. 3 o'clock in theatre class, trying to pull off a King Arthur monologue or something in preparation for the big play.

I'd love to know some of the moments he experienced between the ages of 14 and 18, when he wasn't delivering Shakespeare or 5-7-5 haikus in front of his schoolmates or practicing his dance moves with the hope of joining Digital Underground on stage.