2Pac
Friday
30 June 2023
“If My Homies Call”
This feel-good song is laced with nostalgia. Not only because this is early 2Pac, from his 1991 debut album 2Pacalypse Now, but also because the nature of the song is positive. The upbeat and uplifting vibe is the perfect “pick-me-up” on June 30th for those worn down by a long, rough fiscal year.
Nah, actually, it’s the perfect “pick-me-up” for any time of the year as we don’t recognize the fiscal year on our SLP calendar. But those immersed in a long workweek of tedious bookkeeping or some other soul-sucking labor can put on this track and have their soul regenerated and returned to them. This song represents the return of many things: the return of your soul, the return of 2pac, the return of good music, the return of childhood.
And you can share it with your kids.
This is a kid-friendly 2pac song you can play anywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the original CD with explicit lyrics or the clean version: they are the same as this song doesn’t have any cuss words. So if you accidently happened upon the clean 2pac CD where most of the songs have been desecrated by editing--or you are in a public place where you do not feel comfortable blaring curse words–-this is a track you can lean on.
Any day of the week.
But especially on 2Pac Friday.
In the song 2pac repeatedly declares how he will be there for his friends if they need him. And we all need 2pac on a Friday, after a long work week. He is here for us with “If My Homies Call.” We are calling “Friday” and he is responding with a sweet track.
What more could one want?
In the third verse, 2pac discusses how he and a friend “both had dreams of being great, but his deferred and blurred and changed in shape,” perhaps echoing Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem” questioning “What happens to a dream deferred?” Looking at much of 2pac’s work four decades after Hughes’s poem, could we be exploring–at least in part–an answer to Hughes’s famous question and see what does happen to dreams deferred for segments of the population? That might be too much to explore here. It is complicated.
And we certainly hope that people do not defer the individual dreams under their control, but that also is complicated.
But taking four minutes out of your day to celebrate 2Pac Friday is not.
Do not defer 2pac Friday.