2Pac All Eyez On Me - Review

By Marie Ronnander

Just one year into his life, Lesane Parish Crooks was renamed Tupac Amaru Shakir. His namesake, Tupac Amaru II, was the leader of the last Incan revolt against Spanish conquistadors. His mother, Afeni Shakur, wanted her son to know he was “part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.” Without knowing it, she had put history into motion. Tupac was raised by two Black Panthers in the heart of Harlem, and later central Baltimore. His background steeped him in revolutionary thought, which he unleashed as he took his first microphone as “MC New York”. Each of his albums pour out detailed, personal accounts of the struggles that stem from the glaring socioeconomic and racial divisions in America. “All Eyez on Me,” his last album before his murder, boils down these raw feelings to one of the most inflamed, frenzied, and brilliant albums ever created. At 2 hours and 12 minutes, the album is the first ever double-full-length hip-hop solo studio album (a whole mouthful of a title) released for the public. These songs were written between paranoid shooting nightmares and behind the jail bars of the Clinton Correctional Facility. His thug life lyrics blast with bluesy bass and backups from the Doggs (Snoop and Nate), Dr. Dre, Outlawz, and more. Each song is a salute to growing up poor, and a giant middle finger to the police. Seven months after the album’s debut in 1996, Tupac was killed in a drive-by shooting; wounded from the same violence that echoes in his rhyme schemes. However, he lived up to his mother’s promise and became an integral voice for change in America.