Yet, he was not a great poet or musician. He used the music of various genres as atmosphere and for their beats.
For him, rap was a mix of poetry, drama, and music in which he described situations - familial, political, social - and took on the attributes of a dynamic character within them. His sex raps have a genuine erotic energy and directness. Many of Tupac's raps are unusually intelligent and observant and he moves easily from empathy to taunting cruelty, giving the record an undercurrent of real world feeling. In Until the End of Time, Tupac brags and puts down other men, including other rappers, who he sometimes threatens, and in one rap he says, "Thug niggers don't die.we live the good life." This was wishful thinking and he knew it - and so wrote a "letter to my unborn child," in which he passes on some of what he learned, which includes "being black hurts." In "Breathin' " he says, "I walk around with a knife in my back.Talk about a bad day? I live my life like that." Tupac lived by the sword but also by the word. It wasn't until this year, after I saw a play about Tupac that I then picked up some of his musical works, with his latest recording, Until the End of Time, being the first of them. Mostly, I listened to jazz, world music, alternative rock, and pop music of the 1960s and 1970s. When inclined to listen to rap, I'd put on A Tribe Called Quest, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, MC Lyte, Digital Underground, Me Phi Me, or even Ice-T, generally rappers who seemed deeply humane, progressive. I was saddened by his death, but still did not listen to his music. As with the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley, white rock musicians, a man of distinct sensitivity and radicality seems to have bloomed quickly and just as quickly been plucked from us. I thought he could have had a long, significant career in film. I saw him in a film that he made with Tim Roth, Gridlock'd, and I thought he was a terrific actor - calm, assured, thoughtful, deep. A couple of appreciative obituaries made me think twice about him. The recording easily documents Tupac's appeal and power - and many of us are inclined to say simply Tupac, the way we say Billie (Holiday) or Jimmy (Baldwin) or Spike (Lee), in a display of affectionate though sometimes wary intimacy.īefore Tupac died, I had heard of him, but he had not been at all important to me. Tupac Shakur's legacy of poetry, rap, passion, politics, and scatology continues with the recent release of Until the End of Time, a collection of raps originally recorded during his "Makaveli" period. However, I come now not to criticize Tupac Shakur but to praise him. Rap may be internationally popular, but it's still controversial, especially among those blacks trying to live out standards of respectability the larger world does not seem to comprehend they even know.
2PAC LAST SOUL REMIX LETTER TO MY UNBORN CHILD PROFESSIONAL
After rapper Tupac Shakur (1971-1996) was shot to death by an unknown assailant, I mentioned him to a friend (an African-American male professional who works twelve hour days, financially supports his mother, tutors his nieces and nephews regularly, and doesn't use drugs or even drink alcohol), and before I could say I regretted Tupac Shakur's death my friend said, "If you live by the sword, you die by the sword." The song samples Michael Jackson's 1987 hit " Liberian Girl" (from Bad, 1987), but is set at a higher tempo and features a female vocal backing track by Tena Jones (formerly of 4th Avenue Jones).Let's face it: a lot of rap music is ignorant noise and in its enthusiastic affirmation of criminality, along with its sexism and homophobia, much of rap has set back the black male public image about two hundred years. Shakur relays stories of his own life and advises the child to avoid the troubles that he faced. In the song, Tupac speaks to his then-unborn child as a precaution for fear that he would not be able to meet or speak with them in the event of his death prior to their birth.
The single peaked at number 64 in the airplay chart. The accompanying music video received moderate airplay though it was less successful than the lead single from the album, the title track. " Letter 2 My Unborn" is a song by Tupac Shakur, released as a posthumous single from his album Until the End of Time in 2001. Tupac Shakur, Jason DeFord, Johnny Jackson, Michael Jackson
0 kommentar(er)
