2Pac — Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

Tupac Shakur plans to release his second studio album in 1992, a year after the debut, but "Troublesome 21", the project's original title, is rejected by Warner. The artist creates half an album from the beginning, changes the title ("N.I.G.G.A." is an acronym for "Never Ignorant in Getting Goals Accomplished") and manages to bring some previous tracks into the new project, including "Souljah's Revenge", "Keep Ya Head Up", "Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z...", "The Streetz R Deathrow" and "I Get Around", most of which will make up the final section of the album. Production is provided by a dozen different beatmakers: Live Squad, Stretch, Big D the Impossible, Bobcat, The Underground Railroad, Akshun, Special Ed, Truman Jefferson, DJ Daryl, D-Flow Production Squad, and 2Pac himself. As guests of the album, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Deadly Threat, Live Squad, Digital Underground, Wycked (2Pac's stepbrother, later known as Mopreme), Treach, Apache and Dave Hollister collaborate.

Production is East Coast sound oriented, with funky and hardcore, cheap and minimal boom bap rhythms, hard and pounding drums, easy (George Clinton, James Brown, Sly and the Family, ESG) and decent samples: the overall soundscape is clearly inspired by the Bomb Squad records, if they aren't the ones with Chuck D, it's Ice Cube's solo debut, in any case, from this raw and disordered selection of rhythms, a stiff, rigid sound comes out, old and heavy.

Lyrically, the record tries to move away from the topics addressed two years earlier: the MC is still political and brings out some socio-conscious lines, but he moves towards the West Coast gangsta rap scene by bringing out hardcore, thug bars and street life lines, in a mix of socio-political thoughts and violence. He doesn't just copy and imitate most of the commercially successful artists, it also calls some of his greatest aspirations to spit with him in the project: Treach is present in the final posse, while Ice Cube and Ice-T are the guests of "Last Wordz", where on a generic and energetic funky boom bap that pays homage to the Public Enemy using the same sample of some of their classics, "The Grunt" by J.B.'s, the guest rappers offer a performance not at their best on regular, pounding drum machine.

With 16 cuts and 64 minutes of listening, the album is bloated, sprawling and inevitably erratic: over the course of listening, 2Pac delivers with a youthful, hardcore, flowing and energetic style, however, the production is cheap, decent, very generic and monotonous, the rhythms all sound the same most of the time and become easily forgotten, especially in the opening section. Distributed by TNT Recordings, Restless Records, and especially by Interscope, the album extracts four singles: "Keep Ya Head Up" and "I Get Around" are the most relevant ones, they sample the same song, "Computer Love" by Zapp, get a good commercial success (the first one is gold), and drag the whole project. The album got a good commercial response, being certified platinum in 1995, and reaching the top 25 among pop records and charting #4 among hip-hop albums.

In the midst of all these discreet tracks, where sometimes the drum machine manages to collect enough dust and dirt to identify with the street life situations described by the performer, "Keep Ya Head Up" rises above everything and everyone: practically, it's a cut that has nothing to do with everything else, automatically raising the quality of the entire disc. Light and relaxing funky boom bap, slow, pounding, hard and accessible drum, nostalgic sample from Zapp's "Be Alright", smooth, fantastic, calm delivery by Tupac: he makes a feminist, pro-black women and personal song, performing his three stanzas with a clear, crisp and velvety delivery. Blessed with a soul hook by Dave Hollester, with samples of "Ohh Child" by Five Stairsteps and "Love Computer (Extended Version)" by Zapp, the song is rightly considered one of the best, if not the best one in the artist's entire career.

Other highlights: "Holler If Ya Hear Me", "Last Wordz", "Souljah's Revenge", "Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z...", "I Get Around".

Rating: 7.5/10.