7. (The above footnote absolutely shouldn’t be necessary. But that’s how wacko Nas fans are. They will read that sentence, A SENTENCE THAT REFERS TO HIM AS A GENIUS, and be mad that it didn’t fellate him enough.)
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about retrograde appreciation of a mother, and for mothers in general.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Because everyone loves their mother, or at least loves the idea of a mother, so it had a reach that extended outward for infinity. And this was the vulnerable version of Tupac, which is the second most intriguing version of him, at his most beautiful and captivating.
There’s a great scene early in Juice, Ernest R. Dickerson’s brilliant 1992 film about a series of events that unfold among four friends in Harlem.1 It takes place in an arcade run by Samuel L. Jackson, who is playing a bit part in the movie, because he has at least a bit part in every movie if you pay close enough attention.
In the scene, Tupac, playing a character named Bishop who eventually evolves into the movie’s terrifying antagonist, glides up next to Steel, one of Juice’s other stars (he’s played by Jermaine “Huggy” Hopkins, whom you might more readily remember as “the fat kid” from Lean on Me). He challenges Steel to a game of Street Fighter.
Steel, effervescent and confident, laughs. “What makes you think you can beat me? Tell me. I’d like to know.” Shakur’s bright eyes briefly lose all of their light. He pauses just long enough to establish that his mood is flickering. “Two reasons,” he begins. “For one, if I lose, I’ma beat that ass. For two, if I lose, I’ma beat that ass. So if you don’t put two motherfucking quarters in and get this goddamn game started . . .”
Steel relents.
Truant officers rush into the arcade shortly after, forcing an unfinished end to their game.2 However, the dynamic of Tupac’s character has already been established, and it is a metaphor that extends beyond the role Tupac plays in just that movie and into his real life: He doesn’t lose; not even when he’s bound to lose. Which is how he took what was (it would appear to be) a turbulent relationship with his drug-addicted mother and turned it into “Dear Mama,” one of the greatest rap songs that’s ever been.3
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Quick aside: Tupac was named after Túpac Amaru II, a rebellious Peruvian leader who was eventually sentenced to death by his captors. He had his tongue cut out and his arms and legs each tied to a separate horse and yanked from his body. They removed his head, too. This all came after he’d watched his family get executed. Don’t break any laws in Peru, is basically what I’m telling you.
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Given that this chapter is about a song that’s about Tupac and his view of his mother when he was growing up, it seems to make sense to at least have a section here about Tupac growing up, so that’s what this section is. I will try to keep it as direct as possible:
Tupac was born of an affair between Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland, both then-members of the Black Panther Party.4 He arrived in 1971, one month after Afeni had successfully argued on her own behalf and was acquitted of 156 counts(!!)5 of conspiracy against the U.S. government.6
Garland disappeared when Tupac was five years old, marrying another woman and losing contact with Afeni. In a 2011 interview with XXL, Garland explained that he’d actually not even seen Tupac after he left Afeni until he watched him in Juice,7 somehow managing to sound slightly charming about the whole thing. “I’m sitting here watching Juice, and I am crying. I saw the advertisement. I didn’t know which kid was mine until I saw him.”
Afeni struggled to raise Tupac and his younger half sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, moving from city to city—from New York to Baltimore to Marin City, California. They were impoverished, but that was mostly an extension of Afeni’s drug addiction, which was especially devastating to her son. She was, as she’s said in numerous interviews, almost to the point of being considered an absentee mother much of the time. And from that, Tupac culled and cultivated the angst that propelled him.
Jada Pinkett Smith, whom Tupac befriended while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts and whose own mother was also a drug user, explained the schism Afeni’s chaotic lifestyle had on Tupac in Michael Eric Dyson’s 2006 book Holler If You Hear Me. “Your mother is your pulse to the world. And if that pulse ain’t right, ain’t much else going to be right. I don’t think he ever reconciled [that] within himself.”
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“Dear Mama” was the first single from Me Against the World, the third album from Tupac and one that managed to go double platinum that year despite his being in the thick of serving a prison term when it was released.8 While he’d already shown a superheroic ability to process a milieu that extended beyond himself and produce from that a compelling arc—particularly with regard to women, 1991’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and 1993’s “Keep Ya Head Up,” most courageously—“Dear Mama” outpaced everything he had previously achieved.
The song was produced by Tony Pizarro, and it splices together the Spinners’ “Sadie” (1974), which also happens to be about mothers, with Joe Sample’s “In All My Wildest Dreams” (1978), which doesn’t have any words in it but still might also be about mothers.9 It is warm and nearly sunburnt and definitely emotive.
Despite the obvious complexities of the relationship between Afeni and Tupac, “Dear Mama” is a gorgeous, entirely gripping matriarchal appreciation.10 In the song’s most expository moment, and maybe the most famous line of his career, Tupac floats out the bar “And even as a crack fiend, Mama / You always was a black queen, Mama.”
This, more than any other lyric, more than any other truth, was undeniable to Tupac.
Sweep aside the statistical merits “Dear Mama” collected. It: was certified a platinum single months after its release; was number one on Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart for five straight weeks (again: Tupac was in prison while this was happening, and he only gave one interview the entire time); was picked by Rolling Stone as the eighteenth greatest hip-hop song of all time; earned a Grammy nomination (Best Rap Solo Performance); and was added to the National Recording Registry for preservation by the Library of Congress for its cultural significance, of which had only happened thrice before for rappers.11
But move all that out of the way. And you’re left with Tupac, those big eyes and bigger teeth and emotions that are bigger still.
His succinct, crucial explanation of the song that I just spent two thousand words talking about and that countless others have written countless more words about:
“It’s a love song to my mama.”
Fewer things are simpler. Fewer still are more complex.
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Quick couple of notes about the video, which was an achievement in itself because they filmed it without Tupac there: (1) In it, two guys and a girl sit around a kitchen table playing a board game called Thug Life, which is a variation of the real board game Life. (2) It opens with just this wonderful quote from Afeni: “When I was pregnant, in jail, I thought I was gonna have a baby and the baby would never be with me. But I was acquitted a month and three days before Tupac was born. I was real happy, because I had a son.” (3) An adolescent Tupac, who is supposed to be on his way to school in the video, ditches his books by placing them under a tree in the front yard. That’s adorable. This seems like a good time to point out that Tupac never had any true issues with the police until after he became a rapper. This was addressed indirectly in the most endearing fashion in the 2003 documentary Resurrection, where Tupac talks about the time he attempted to be a drug dealer: “I tried selling drugs for maybe two weeks. Then the dude was like, ‘Aw, man. Gimme my drugs back.’ ’Cuz I didn’t know how to do it!” A drug dealer told Tupac Shakur “Gimme my drugs back.” I’ve never heard of a thing so perfect.
REBUTTAL: “SHOOK ONES PT. II” MOBB DEEP
Something happens when “Shook Ones Pt. 2” comes on. Keep your eye out next time you’re in a bar and you hear it. Glasses will shatter, grown men will grip each other for support, and everyone’s
head starts nodding like it’s being choreographed by some kind of higher power. The opening sounds, sampled from Quincy Jones’s “Kitty with the Bent Frame,” is like some kind of Manchurian Candidate signal that programs people to wild out. It starts out feeling like it was beamed in from another planet, but when the beat drops, and Prodigy says, “I got you stuck off the realness, we be the infamous,” you know this could only come from the bottom of a stairwell, somewhere on the 41st side of Queensbridge.
You remember where you were the first time you heard it, you remember how you felt when 8 Mile opened with it, and every time you think of it, you need to hear it as soon as possible. 1995 is one of the high-water marks in hip-hop history, but no song from that damaged, beautiful year has had the staying power of “Shook Ones Pt. 2.”
—CHRIS RYAN
Dear Mama
“When I was young, me and my mama had beef” (0:11)
“Ain’t a woman alive that could take my mama’s place” (0:21)
“I shed tears with my baby sister” (0:29)
“And even though we had different daddies, the same drama” (0:35)
“I reminisce on the stress I caused” (0:42)
“And who’d think in elementary, hey, I’d see the penitentiary one day?” (0:51)
“And even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama” (1:00)
“No love from my daddy ‘cause the coward wasn’t there” (1:40)
“I needed money on my own soil started slangin’” (2:01)
“And there’s no way I can pay you back, but my plan is to show you that I understand” (2:44)
“To keep me happy there’s no limit to the things you did” (3:18)
“Everything will be alright if you hold on” (3:49)
Powerful, Hopeful, Introspective, Insightful, Considerate, Autobiographical, Descriptive
1. I saw Juice for the first time shortly before I started middle school. I watched it with my mom and dad, because that’s how you’re supposed to watch it, I’m pretty sure. The first day of sixth grade, when my mom dropped me off, she spied an older Mexican kid wearing a hoodie. She called me close. “You see that boy over there?” she said, eyeing him. “Remember that movie we watched? The one about juice? He looks like he was in it. Stay away from him, okay? You don’t need his juice.” Moms are so clutch, man.
2. Near the end of the movie, Tupac shoots Steel in the gut. It was not because of Street Fighter, FYI.
3. It really is beautiful. Oddly enough, in a 1995 interview with Bill Bellamy at MTV, Tupac explained that he wrote it one morning while he was on the toilet.
4. Tupac’s godfather, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, was also a very famous member of the Black Panther Party. He was convicted in 1972 of kidnapping and murder, though after he’d served twenty-seven years in prison his murder charge was “vacated,” which is just a nicer way to say that it was erased because of unscrupulous tactics used by the prosecution to get him convicted in the first place.
5. Afeni has mentioned that she’d previously been pregnant but had not been able to carry a baby past three months. Embryo Tupac not only made it past the three-month mark but also made it through a prison sentence his mother was serving as well as a court case against the government of the United States. My sons were eighteen months old before they could even walk. Shameful.
6. Allegedly plotting to blow stuff up, as it were.
7. Garland didn’t meet Tupac again in person until 1994. He visited him in the hospital after he’d been shot five times outside of Manhattan’s Quad Studios. In the 2002 documentary Biggie & Tupac, Garland jokes about how Tupac responded to reports that he’d had a testicle shot off by flashing his junk at his father. It was only the second time they’d seen each other in nearly two decades.
8. Tupac became the first artist to have an album atop the Billboard charts while in prison.
9. ALL things are probably about mothers, really.
10. “Dear Mama” was so good that it made me mad at my mom for not being addicted to crack. I wasn’t that smart as a kid. I’m still not, I suppose. :-/
11. The other three: Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” (see this page), Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (see this page), and Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet.”
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
How much fun it is to live in California.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It was the reverse engineering of the gangsta rapper, who was—at this moment—styled in Tupac’s mold. It also married gangsta rap and G-Funk.
The first proper single of Tupac’s career was “Brenda’s Got a Baby” in 1991, and that’s kind of insane to think about, and it’s insane in two different ways: (1) because of what it is about, and (2) because of what Tupac eventually came to represent in rap.
“Brenda’s Got a Baby” is about an illiterate twelve-year-old girl who gets impregnated by her older cousin,1 secretly gives birth to the baby on a bathroom floor,2 puts the baby in a Dumpster,3 gets kicked out of her house,4 attempts to become a crack dealer,5 gets robbed,6 becomes a prostitute,7 then gets murdered.8 It’s as “socially conscious” a rap song as has ever been written.
The singles that followed either replicated the tone (though rarely to such extremes) or spun in the other direction altogether. Over one very eager stretch of six months in 1993, he released “Holler If Ya Hear Me,” a frustration anthem and his very best Public Enemy impersonation, followed by “Keep Ya Head Up,” a female empowerment song, followed by “I Get Around,” which is about having lots of sex with lots of females. The contradiction was an early indication of the kind of in-the-moment, emotionally reflective artist Tupac was, and would become, and that’s how we get to what Tupac came to represent:
Distilled down to its pith, the entirety of gangsta rap imagery is Tupac; he is the archetypal gangsta rapper, and he has come to stand in for any and all other rappers in the subgenre. That’s an easy claim to make because he, in fact, perfected gangsta rap, but it’s also slightly tricky. He was so convincing in the role that he effectively rendered all other portrayals obsolete, or, worse still, uncool. (Nearly) all of the images we’ve come to associate with gangsta rap are images he presented. And the origination of that version of him was him on “California Love,” when Dr. Dre stood back behind him in the Thunderdome and framed his mania, and it was so exciting and obvious when it happened.
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“California Love” is a great song. It’s a funky, chirping, fever of noise, the sonic weirdness is boxed in by Roger Troutman’s robo charm, pummeled into acquiescence by Tupac’s fury, and weighed and measured by Dre’s steadiness. All three parts play perfectly together. Examined free of the context of Tupac’s career, it would have lived a perfectly pleasant life, and likely even still managed to become critical to the rap genre.
But it arrived to an almost unfathomably perfect orchestra of circumstance, and so it is endlessly important today, and forever, on earth and in heaven and anywhere else they listen to rap. To wit:
• It was the first song Tupac released when he got out of prison in 1996, and that would’ve been gigantic all by itself. But the insanity surrounding his court case at the time of his sentencing had grown his indestructible gangster myth tenfold,9 so Tupac getting out of prison was less him getting out of prison and more him rolling away the stone and stepping up out of the tomb.
• It was the first song from his new album, All Eyez on Me, which was coming behind Me Against the World, his most successful album to that point, commercially (it moved more than 3.5 million units) and critically (“Dear Mama”; see this page).
• It was the first thing he delivered under Death Row, a label that was, at that moment, the biggest and baddest and most overwhelming in rap.10
• It was produced by Dr. Dre.
• And his amazing film run from 1992 to 1994 (Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim)11 stretched his name well beyond the parameters of just rap, and even just music.<
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You can imagine the sort of fervor that surrounded this song when it dropped. It was his biggest song figuratively, because of its commercial success, but also literally. Up to that point he’d mostly been an insular artist, with ideas and thoughts aimed in specific directions. “California Love” gave him the wide-screen treatment we’d watch the Notorious B.I.G. get later. It was a glimpse at what he was going to do as a proper superstar, and also pointed toward where Puff Daddy would eventually take rap.12
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“California Love” was not originally Tupac’s song. There are two conflicting stories on how he nabbed it. One comes from Chris “The Glove” Taylor, who claims he helped produce the track (though he received no credit for it), and the other from Death Row’s cofounder and former CEO Suge Knight, who is like if an angry rhino began morphing into a human and then stopped halfway through and so that’s just how he was stuck.
The parts that they quibble about are the parts you’d expect (Taylor says he helped piece together the track with Dr. Dre at his house, while Knight tells some overly complex story about a stylist wearing a leather suit and that’s where the Mad Max theme for the video came from, or something), but they both agree on one point: It belonged to Dr. Dre before it belonged to Tupac. Taylor says he and Dre made it at Dre’s house during a get-together, and then Tupac showed up and was in the studio so he recorded a verse for it. Knight says that the song had been written for Dre, but since The Chronic had already been out, and since Tupac’s album was on its way, Suge thought the song should go to Tupac. There’s a moment during Suge’s explanation where he basically congratulates himself for not blatantly stealing the whole song by allowing Dre to remain on it, and it’s easy to see how Suge eventually pile-drove Death Row into nothingness.
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The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 14