2Pac, All Eyez On Me
Featured Album
After two hours, is the listener's exhaustion vicarious or inherited?
There were fewer eyes back then, in the mid 1990s, a blink or two before hip-hop blossomed into a stable, safe form of global pop. All Eyez on Me — a compelling, colossal double-album and an even more engrossing story — helped insure that victory.
Despite his surging representation as a rapper and actor, 2Pac spent the release of his chart-topping breakthrough Me Against the World locked up. He had to rely on the dark machinations of Suge Knight to bail him out, and in return, he owed three albums to Knight's Death Row label. Bloated and excessive or the product of a visionary, clock-racing genius, All Eyez on Me constitutes two of them. A little more than two hours in total and recorded in a feverish, two-week span after Knight's act of largesse, All Eyez is a total, desperate commitment to persona. There are the thrill-sprees of "Skandalouz" and the pristine "How Do You Want It," the unapologetically unapologetic "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted," the heroic title cut, the clink-clank memoir-as-manifesto "Ambitionz Az a Ridah." The duo "Life Goes On" and "I Ain't Mad Atcha" are suffused with absorbing detail and a bracing penitence — they remain among hip-hop's most sensitive moments. Ultimately, the influence All Eyez had on future generations had more to do with its sheer force of will, its pure investment in itself: its willingness to hate, cause ruckus and not give anything resembling a fuck. After two hours, is the listener's exhaustion vicarious or inherited?
This was 2Pac's fourth studio album. He would only oversee the release of one more, the economical, gripping Makaveli, though you wouldn't know it given the impossible, infinite, online ocean of posthumous tracks that seems to replenish daily.
