2Pac Friday
10 November 2023
I have always especially liked 2Pacalypse Now. I cannot say it is my favorite 2Pac album because choosing and singling out one 2Pac album as a favorite is an impossible task. However, this is such a great album and always stands out to me.
A first album really should. We could make a laundry list of first album they may indeed be the best albums or at least the realest albums for musicians. I like Pearl Jam and Ten is not only deservedly their most popular album, but also their most dynamic. I love many of their other albums, but there is something special about Ten.
There is usually something great about debut albums. I speculate they are special for a variety of reasons, but one may be that almost a lifetime (to that point in a musician’s life) of material is almost jampacked into one album. Songs, concepts, and other creative ruminations that the artist has been thinking about in one way or another is packed into the album. Then, the artist gets famous, does interviews, goes on tour, and comes out with another album in a year a year or two—with much less time of material (at least theoretically, according to this light theory here) packed into that album.
Another reason I speculate that debut album may be special is perhaps artists and producers and the record companies are yet to respond as much to what they expect the public to want from album in order to make it popular and profitable. In other words, perhaps debut albums are more concerned with themselves, with their own art, than trying to anticipate (and perhaps preemptively adjust) to potential responses to it. Again, I am not sure about this; it is just a thought.
There are other reasons I also suspect debut albums could be special, but let’s not go on and on about this forever.
Of course there are positive factors of follow-up albums, such as experience, improving one’s craft, enjoying better collaborative opportunities, etc. Of course, there are pros and cons to virtually everything in this world, and this is no exception.
As this all relates to this week’s featured track, “Words of Wisdom,” I always wonder if tracks like this—which 2Pacalypse Now is filled with many—would make it on later albums.
In fact, such songs (songs more concerned with conveying a meaning than a catchy or popular tune) really don’t. They are not completely absent from 2Pac’s later albums, but they are not as common as this album, which is virtually a whole album from the first track to the last of 2Pac explicitly (both in terms of clearly and with curse words) expressing or communicating not only his own experiences, but even more so those he observes around him to the larger public. Even the singles from this album, like “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and “Young Black Male,” fit this mold.
“Words of Wisdom” is a great track in that is clearly conveys what are indeed words of wisdom from 2Pac’s perspective. I will never completely (or even less than completely) be able to understand what it feels like from his perspective and I don’t have to ever completely understand or agree with everything he says (for instance, in this song he seems to be dismissive of MLK, whom I’m a big fan of), but I still love not only his music itself but his communication of his perspective through his music.
It is so important to understand where we come from. Not every musician does that—and they are not obligated to do so (no one is obligated to do so)—but 2Pac chooses to and does so in a very effective way. And so on this, another great 2Pac Friday, we celebrate such “Words of Wisdom.”