12/23/2023 0 Comments Tupac changes album![]() ![]() Rappers often make good actors because they are role-players and storytellers. He landed his first movie role in 1991, the same year he released his debut album. Former teachers and students at his two high schools, where he played Othello and the Mouse King, remember him as a sweet, thoughtful theatre kid who loved poetry and dance. Tupac’s brief, protean life has taken on allegorical power and New Yorker writer Sheldon Pearce’s oral history clarifies the turning points. He talks instead of survival and revenge: “Fear is stronger than love.” The following year, he was shot dead at the age of 25. When we see him again, in an interview from 1995, some vital part of him has shut down. His mother, Afeni Shakur, gave birth just weeks after she was acquitted in the 1971 trial of the Panther 21, and raised him to think that he was “the Black Prince of the revolution”. Even as an unknown teenager, he flares with charisma as he talks about reviving the revolutionary spirit of the Black Panthers. “Runnin’ (Dying To Live)” - If listening to a new Tupac single after his death wasn’t strange enough, the 2003 album “Tupac: Resurrection” featured this remake of his 1995 song “Runnin’ From The Police.” That track featured another legendary rap star, Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered six months after Tupac.There’s a clip in Adam Curtis’s documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head of an interview Tupac Shakur gave when he was a high school student in California in 1988. “Still Ballin'” - A 2003 single from the album “Better Dayz” that serves as part two to “Str8 Ballin’,” a song from Tupac’s “Thug Life” side project. “Letter 2 My Unborn” - Though it didn’t chart as well as “Until The End Of Time,” Tupac’s letter to the kid he never had is worth a listen, as the rapper jumps between expressing his wishes for the future and reflecting on the rocky relationship he had with his mother. “Until The End Of Time” - This was the title track off of Tupac’s quadruple platinum 2001 album, and when you hear the last lines of the song, it’s clear why the album got named after it: “If an angel comes down and takes me away/Memories of me and my songs will always stay/Until the end of time” “Ghetto Gospel” - Another reflective piece has Tupac thinking about younger generations that got “a world that’s cursed” and the older generations “living out of a bag” in a 2004 release that samples Elton John. Released in 2002, it’s one of Tupac’s more self-reflective pieces and name drops several major figures in African-American history. Phoenix to paint his picture of what his idea of heaven is. ![]() “Thugz Mansion” - Tupac teams up with Nas and J. Sample lines: “So we loot, please don’t shot when ya see/I’m takin from them, cause for years they would take from me/Now the tables are turned around/You didn’t listen until the n**** burned it down.” It’s nod to the Rodney King riots and the simmering resentments that caused it to happen feel prophetic in the wake of the Ferguson protests and the rise of Black Lives Matter. “I Wonder If Heaven Got A Ghetto” - Several lines from “Changes” came from this single, the first posthumous Tupac single. “Changes” - Tupac received a posthumous Grammy for this song off the 1998 Greatest Hits album, which touches on the social forces both inside and outside African-American neighborhoods that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. “Hail Mary” - Another single from the Makaveli album, “Hail Mary” got a big spike on the charts in 2012 when it was used for the Tupac Hologram performance with Snoop Dogg and Dr. At its core is “To Live And Die In L.A.,” a tribute to Los Angeles that gives Compton and Baldwin Hills the same love Randy Newman gave Santa Monica and the Imperial Highway in “I Love L.A.” “To Live And Die In L.A.” - Originally meant for a March 1997 release to unveil Tupac’s alternate stage name, Makaveli,” the album “Don Killuminati” was released two months after Tupac’s death and is considered to be one of the greatest rap albums ever. As the hip-hop world pays tribute to Tupac today, here’s some of his best posthumous singles. Tupac left behind enough songs to make five more albums after his death, along with several collaborative projects. It’s hard to gauge just how much amazing music the world lost when Tupac Shakur‘s career was cut short 20 years ago, but his intense creative drive has left fans with more material since his death than we could ever imagine. 10 Best Tupac Shakur Singles Since His Death 20 Years Ago (Videos) ![]()
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