A year after the last time, we find him here in front with his hands clasped over his mouth in a sort of prayer in the dark, while the boy is asking "are you still down?" Apparently, a posthumous album wasn't enough, because 2Pac's mother Afeni Shakur decides to collect some unreleased material recorded between 1992 and 1994, when the artist was under contract with Interscope Records, which in the meantime sold the rights to Tupac's recordings to her mother's newborn label Amaru Entertainment, and to publish it as a new double CD of unreleased material by the legendary rapper, even if it includes already released tracks such as "Definition of a Thug Nigga", included in the soundtrack of the film "Poetic Justice" (1993), as well as the remix of "I Wonder If Heaven's Got a Ghetto", released as a b-side of the single "Keep Ya Head Up" in 1993 and the song "I'm Getting Money" which is identical to "Str8 Ballin'" except for three words.
The music is composed by 2Pac, We Got Kidz Productions, Ricky House, Akshun, Tony Pizarro, QDIII, Soulshock & Karlin, Live Squad, Mike Mosley, Natural Fynest, Warren G, DJ Daryl, Quimmy Quim, Johnny "J", Choo, Def Jef, Levant Marcus, Chris Rosser & Conrad Rosser. The guests of the record are Akshun, Stretch, Val Young, Y?N-Vee, Richie Rich, Big Syke, Spice 1, Eric Williams of Blackstreet, Dramacydal, Dave Hollister, Maxee and Yaki Kadafi.
It's scary to even think about making a 26 track track by track of such poor quality. I enjoyed this double album, even excessively, the first few times I listened to it. Over a decade after the last time, my thoughts on these tracks are almost opposite. The lyrics are pretty poor, revolving around themes of gangsterism, violence, battle braggadocio, street life. The music is subpar, despite also coming from guys who have delivered authentic masterpieces to 2Pac, such as Tony Pizarro, QDIII, Soulshock & Karlin, Mike Mosley, Warren G, Johnny "J", practically nothing really works, no beat is up to the level of the best productions in the artist's discography. The set is supervised by We Got Kidz Productions, under which hides the Outlawz member EDI Mean: everything sounds pretty watered down and too much pop rap, for whatever reason.
Released by Amaru, Jive and Interscope, it's the first of a myriad of posthumous albums by 2Pac. The product features two singles, "I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto", a hit whose lyrics will be used again for "Changes", another posthumous single by the artist that achieves global success, and "Do For Love", where the New York-born emcee delivers bars with a good flow on a skeletal, amazing and fluid production that credits Soulshock & Karlin behind the keyboards but that actually sees the mythical hand of J Dilla, and his typical lo-fi sound infused with soul. This track, a rare collaboration between two Legends, becomes a hit and obtains the certification of gold record by the RIAA. Two weeks after the release of the double album, the RIAA certifies it quadruple platinum for over two million physical copies sold, over half a million in the first week alone. It remains number one on the hip-hop charts for a few weeks, stopping at number two on the Billboard 200 and gaining acclaim on three continents.
Hated by most fans, massacred by music critics, this effort is a mess that piles up leftover, discarded, low-quality, often shoddy tracks from the rapper's recordings made in the early nineties and that only prove to you that the boy combined a rare artistic prolificacy with a strict quality control on his material and this allowed him to make one strong album after another, also carving out several disks that decades later we can still call classics and some of the best ever in the history of hip-hop. With the exception of the singles, nothing you can hear on this double CD is able to stand up to the level of the tracks released on Tupac Shakur's best albums, and there's a reason why they were all discarded. Not recommended, 5/10.
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