Recommendations of the Editorial team
The 100 best musicians of all time: Tupac Shakur – Essay of 50 Cent
Every rapper who grew up in the nineties somehow is to blame in Tupac’s. Either you tried to orientate yourself on him – or you deliberately hit another way because you couldn’t identify with him.
My favorite album from Tupac Shakur is “The Don Killuminati”: it was recorded after he was shot and had already sitting in jail. One had the impression that a doctor had told him that he had to die – and now he is trying to put all his thoughts on paper. And that’s something that an average rapper would not be able to do: to build a whole album on this concept and to tell everything from this one negative perspective. Everyone knows that they have to die, but if you are confronted with a life -threatening situation, you think a little more about it.
His aggressive recordings are my loved ones; “Hail Mary” is just perfect. Most of today’s rappers would simply not be smart enough to write something like that – or not honest enough to get across with a line like this: “I ain’t a Killer, but don’t push me.” Today it would only mean flat and unimaginative: “I’ll kill you.”
Everyone loved Tupac on the east coast
Tupac Shakur was like a camera. It is incredible how much he wrote how much he documented with his eyes. For me he was more and more a poet than a rapper. If you hear one of his verses, you know who he comes from. And ‘Pac put his whole life on paper. Perhaps he even overrided it: Because he was in public, all of his statements were examined.
Everyone loved Tupac on the east coast. And now that he is no longer among us, he is greater than ever. I can still listen to two or three Tupac CDs in a row. Then I’m back in the right mood to take care of my own things.
Laurence Fishburne once told me that he didn’t like Tupac: He would not have understood Tupac’s behavior because he was much smarter. I understood what he wanted to say. But I still stared at him as if he had lost his mind.