#Tupac r u still down poster how to
He spends so much time trying to scare his enemies that he doesn’t make any friends, with no musical room in his trebly beats for sex, humor, play or romance.Ī classically trained actor from the Baltimore School for the Arts, Tupac knew how to express his rage. Tupac tries his hand at social commentary, but it’s always the world’s fault - never his - so he’s an unconvincing moralist. Here there aren’t any of his clumsy but sweet pro-woman raps (“Dear Mama,” “Keep Ya Head Up”) to balance out the steady stream of bitch-baiting. The key to Tupac’s appeal was how vividly he dramatized the tension between his Thug Life and his moments of tenderness. He taps into the same raving, inchoate fury that inspired the Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud,” the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies” and N.W.A.’s “Gangsta Gangsta.” The problem with R U Still Down? is that the rage feels one-dimensional, no matter how sincere. “16 on Death Row” offers his advice to the kids: “Please stay strapped/Pack a gat every day.” (You were expecting another “Stay in school”?) And in the title track, he turns the vocal call-and-response of James Brown’s “Sex Machine” into his own stomping funeral march.Īt its best, Tupac’s music articulates the mindless rage that’s always been part of rock & roll’s inspiration. “Hellrazor” and “Fuck All Y’All” are two of his toughest tracks ever: morbid, blustering, brutal. But if you’ve ever had an enemy, Tupac’s bravado can be truly intoxicating, and some of the hate rants here are prime Tupac. Tupac’s Thug Life theme park is as much a pure pop fantasy as Spice World it’s a fantasy of beating every rap, avenging every insult and squashing every enemy. The musical highlights, like the clunkers, celebrate Tupac’s vision: glamorous young thugs living the high life in a mean world that they’ll never admit to their part in making. But at least it offers some good early Tupac material. So R U Still Down? doesn’t offer a coherent testament. All we know about these songs is that Tupac chose to not release them it’s virtually impossible to tell how much he had to do with the way they sound now. There’s also a Tupac portrait in the style of Vincent van Gogh - well, he died young, too, didn’t he? (The album’s “Black Starry Night” is, mercifully, not a sequel to Don McLean’s “Vincent.”) Would Tupac have approved of the way the We Got Kidz crew has meddled with his songs? The leadoff track, for instance, is a jazz-guitar instrumental that barely features Tupac. Instead, the CD booklet offers six pages of ads for “official 2Pac gear,” including Tupac T-shirts, beanies, bandannas and commemorative phone cards. There are no recording dates, and no clues about how much of the music was added posthumously by We Got Kidz Productions, whoever they are.
The liner notes don’t tell you why these particular tracks were culled from the pile he left behind.
The album doesn’t really make sense of the Tupac legacy it’s no map of the emotional complexities and contradictions that he brought to musical life. Tupac Shakur's Sister Sues Executor of Rapper's Estate for Embezzlement R U Still Down? doesn’t even dig into the Death Row trove - these are outtakes Tupac recorded and abandoned while he was under contract to Interscope, between 19. She claims that there are almost 200 more tracks where these came from, so bet on Tupac to rival Jimi Hendrix as the hardest-working dead guy in show business. Shakur formed to release Tupac’s leftovers after winning the rights to his music in her lawsuit against Death Row. R U Still Down? is the maiden release for Amaru, the label Ms. Tupac’s career as a dead icon is just beginning, guided by this album’s co-executive producer, his mother, Afeni Shakur. R U Still Down? is the first collection of Tupac’s unreleased tracks, and if you think it’ll be the last, Jim Morrison has a hotel he’d like to sell you. Instead, they sound like business as usual. On the double album R U Still Down? (Remember Me), these fantasies stand at center stage, but they don’t sound particularly prophetic, unseemly or, God knows, ironic. Long before he was murdered in September 1996 at the age of 25, Tupac rapped obsessively about his death-trip fantasies. But then, death was always Tupac’s thing. Certainly the specter of death hovers over all these tracks, as the late hip-hop superstar brags about dying young in a blaze of glory and getting buried with his. The strangest thing about Tupac “2Pac” Shakur’s first official posthumous album is that it doesn’t sound all that different from his other albums.
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