Album of the Day — June 19
2Pac — Me Against the World
2Pac — Me Against the World
19.June.2020
2Pac
Me Against the World
1995
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Tupac Shakur to not only hip-hip but to music. Full stop.
It’s also hard to believe this album is now 25 years old. How’d that happen?
At just 23 years old, 1995’s, Me Against the World was the album where Tupac showed that he was more than just a rabble-rouser. He willingly revealed a mature and more sensitive approach to his craft.
There comes a point in everyone’s life where they have to put their bullshit behavior behind them. For some it’s at 19, others it’s 31 for Tupac it was 23.
Me Against the World put the industry on notice. Shakur let the world know that he was more than what he was being tagged or portrayed as. He did take rap seriously, he did take life seriously. Even more, he wanted to be taken seriously. Shakur said:
“Me Against the World was really to show people that this is an art to me. That I do take it like that. And whatever mistakes I make, I make out of ignorance, not out of disrespect to music or the art.”
Recorded primarily as he was waiting to serve a jail sentence for sexual assault, the lyrics portray a more reflective Tupac with considerably less bravado than he prior albums. The themes he attacks on Me Against the World means the album clocks in at almost 70 minutes.
Tupac Shakur had a lot on his mind.
Shakur himself considered it a “blues record” and if you examine the etymology of the word “blues”, he’s right.
The first known usage of the word “blues” in the context of mood comes from the Anti-Slavery activist and educator Charlotte Forten.
As a teacher in South Carolina instructing both slaves and freedmen she wrote in her diary in December 1862 that one day she had “came home with the blues” because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. Her remedy was music.
To lift her mood, she looked to songs that were popular among slaves, like “Poor Rosy” — the type of songs that “can’t be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit” — the two most potent ingredients of blues music.
On Me Against the World Shakur reveals that he has both a “full heart and a troubled spirit” and addresses them by singing about his upbringing, the struggle of male survival in the ghetto, anguish, self-hatred, and paranoia.
The beauty of Tupac’s writing is that he can take all those these themes and button them up into two lines that open the first track “If I Die 2nite”:
A coward dies a thousand deaths
A soldier dies but once
The alliteration Shakur employs is a key component of what makes his songs not only so powerful but easy to listen to — even in light of the content. It’s rare when listening to a hip-hop song or album that the beats used don’t overpower the lyrics, but on Me Against the World, it’s Tupac’s use of alliteration that pulls you and overpowers the samples … and not just because of what he’s saying.
Again in “If I Die 2Nite”, a song about gang warfare:
Pussy and paper is poetry, power, and pistols
Plotting on murdering motherfuckers ‘fore they get you
Pray to the heavens, .357’s to the sky
And I hope I’m forgiven for thug living when I die
The “P” alliteration here makes the lyrics flow and rise above the music. It also helps that Shakur and his team of producers are using samples from soul/funk staples like Betty White’s “Tonight is the Night”, Kleeer’s “Tonight”, and Alicia Meyers “If You Play Your Cards Right” which make the song less corrosive and more reflective.
In “Me Against the World” Shakur takes those blues elements that Charlotte Forten defined as “loneliness and self-pity” in 1864 and modernized them about life in the ghetto against a backbeat of Minnie Ripperton and Issac Hayes:
They’re relocating to the cemetery
Got me worried, stressin’, my vision’s blurried
The question is will I live? No one in the world loves me
I’m headed for danger, don’t trust strangers
Put one in the chamber whenever I’m feelin’ this anger
Don’t wanna make excuses, ’cause this is how it is
What’s the use unless we’re shootin’ no one notices the youth
It’s just me against the world baby
Sure, the words are caustic on the track but Tupac leaves “Me Against the World” on a positive note:
That’s right
I know it seem hard sometimes but uh
Remember one thing
Through every dark night, there’s a bright day after that
So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out
Keep your head up, and handle it
Urban ghetto or suburban tract housing, that’s a message that transcends race and class.
For years I discounted hip-hop naively believing it was music I simply couldn’t identify with. If I’m honest, because I didn’t grow up in an urban environment or a ghetto, I felt that I couldn’t relate.
Well, that’s bullshit.
While I have no reference point, and never will, if you listen closely to artists like Shakur, you hear two things:
What their life is/was like and if you have a shred of empathy in you, it’s eye-opening. Pay close enough attention to the lyrics and the smarter of the artists don’t glorify it. Now, this doesn’t make you a “woke” individual, it just means that listening to artists like Shakur can — if you allow them — provide insight into other aspects of the human condition.
If you’re a music fan at all, digging around on these tracks to find out what songs are sampled is like going on an archaeological dig. And from that, you can’t help but be in awe of the depth of musical knowledge the producers of these albums have.
There is also a prescient element to Me Against the World that cannot be denied.
In “So Many Tears” it’s as though Tupac Shakur knows how his life will play out:
Now I’m lost and I’m weary So many tears
I’m suicidal so don’t stand near me
My every move is a calculated step, to bring me closer
To embrace an early death, now there’s nothing left
There was no mercy on the streets, I couldn’t rest
I’m barely standing, bout to go to pieces, screamin’ peace
I’m fallin’ to the floor; beggin’ for the Lord to let me in
To Heaven’s door — Shed so many tears
Dear Mama
The bond between mother and son is complicated. And it’s one that transcends race and class. And on “Dear Mama” Tupac Shakur provides one of the most beautiful homages to that relationship.
There are different cultural experiences in his narrative but the overriding sentiment of a son acknowledging his appreciation of his mother is profoundly moving:
Dear mama
Don’t you know I love you?
Dear mama
Place no one above you
Oh mama, I appreciate you
Although my shadow’s gone
I will never leave you
I appreciate you
I love you
I need you
Oh mama
The cycle of life dictates that there will come a day when most men will face the conundrum of whether or not they’ve been able to tell their mother they’ve appreciated them.
“Dear Mama” topped the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart and peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2009, the song was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States” and added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress.
Me Against the World debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and #1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, making Tupac the first artist to have a #1 album on both the Pop and R&B charts.
Me Against the World is universally thought to be not only his best but one of the best albums in hip-hop history:
Cheo H. Coker in his review for Rolling Stone said the album was “by and large a work of pain, anger and burning desperation — the first time 2Pac has taken the conflicting forces tugging at his psyche head-on.”
Jon Pareles reviewed the album for The New York Times and called Shakur the “St. Augustine of gangster rap”.
Matt Hall in the British publication Select agreed with Tupac: “This may be the first hip-hop blues LP. Not so much in the music, although the harp blasts owe more to Howlin’ Wolf than Tupac’s previous two solo efforts, but more with Shakur’s vocals, which are at once rebellious and resigned … Me Against the World is a statement of intent, a note from the depths of America, and a fine, thoughtful LP.”
In a career that is loaded with benchmark and genre-defining albums, it’s Me Against the World that is the piece de’ la resistance in Tupac Shakur’s catalog, of hip-hop from the mid-90s and one of the best albums in history. Full stop.