The pattern for recent hip-hop Number 1s on Popular – Nelly’s pair being the best example – has been the chart-topper as a kind of medal for services rendered, generally coming an album cycle after the artist’s more vital work. Mostly that’s a function of the low weekly sales of Number 1s at this point, so canny labels could time new releases and harvest the interest created by previous hits. Still, 2Pac is taking matters to an extreme here; “Ghetto Gospel” is the lead single from his sixth posthumous album, which is two more than he released during his actual lifetime. It’s been eight years since a record came out with input from the living Tupac Shakur: his career at this stage is based on his prodigious workload when alive and the vast quantity of unreleased material he left behind.
Read more: 2PAC ft ELTON JOHN – “Ghetto Gospel”
But there’s also something about Tupac that draws people to the idea of resurrection, of extending (or less charitably, meddling with) his legacy in a way we really only otherwise see with Elvis. In 2012, Dr Dre will cause a sensation by bringing a ‘hologram’ of Pac out on stage at Coachella; it’s the old Pepper’s Ghost stage illusion that powers the ABBA Voyage simulacra. In 2024, Drake will enlist an “AI version” of 2Pac into his disastrous feud with Kendrick Lamar, to general derision: the track was quickly taken down.
So there’s a fascination with 2Pac which extends beyond his earthly talent. Seven posthumous LPs, some double, suggests ruthless exploitation of the vaults, and – without knowing the discography well – I’m sure there’s truth in that. But there’s also careful curation and thematic management going on, and a will to establish 2Pac as myth and icon. A lot of this is down to the rapper’s mom, activist Afeni Shakur, her son’s executor until her own death in 2016, who performed a Yoko-esque role as guardian of the legacy as well as getting involved in multiple brutal legal fights with the many others wanting a share of the posthumous 2Pac money.
The legacy Afeni Shakur looked to protect is one of complexity. The thing every biography or piece on 2Pac stresses, beyond his actual rapping and song-writing, is how he’s a multi-faceted, irreducible figure. Every angle you take on him – activist, poet, self-described thug, crafter of liberation anthems or cornball pop hits – is incomplete without a mention of its counterforces. Tupac’s example as a hip-hop artist is that he’s allowed to contain multitudes; he’s not pushed into one role (the firebrand; the joker; the gangster; the pop star; the loverman; the technician) in a way most rappers of the generation just before his were. To reduce him to a part is to lose the whole.
But, acknowledging all that, individual releases are going to focus on one version of Tupac Shakur at a time. The cover of Loyal To The Game, the album “Ghetto Gospel” is trailing, has the rapper with head slightly bowed, in a check jacket with the colour so saturated it looks like a snow white robe, next to a golden cross. He’s wearing granny glasses, which means he looks a little like Ghandi. This is Tupac in his saintliest aspect, the bringer of peace, and the verses on the Eminem-supervised album are all drawn from his work before he got into the East Coast/West Coast feud that defined his final years.
While Eminem’s involvement here wasn’t the focus of the “Ghetto Gospel” promo push, it’s a lot more interesting than Elton John’s role, which is down to a feature credit to lure in British punters and a sample from 1971’s “Indian Sunset”, selected by Eminem anyway. The song takes two verses, and occasional lines, from a 1992 Tupac original – apparently intended for a Christmas album, though there’s nothing festive about it – but the track works as a companion to Eminem’s own “Like Toy Soldiers”, part of the newer rapper’s reckoning with feuding and violence.
Eminem’s treatment of “Ghetto Gospel” gets described as a remix, but it’s an entire reconstruction, slowing 2Pac’s rapping down by about a quarter, which makes him sound gruffer and less verbally dextrous, like he’s rapping while carrying a weight. The original has a production which would have sounded mildly dated in the G-Funk era and positively nostalgic on a 2005 release, with looped samples all over the place – funky organ, a gospel singer, scratching. Eminem junks that, adding a portentious keyboard and string backing which lets him put heavy emphases on dramatic line-ending words – “baby”; “slavery”; “courage” – which are just part of the flow on the 1992 reading.
This is a tone shift, making “Ghetto Gospel” into the kind of solemn-sounding rap song the British public have tended to love. If 2Pac had asked before his death, “How can I get a big UK hit?”, a good bit of advice would have been “Make something like Gangsta’s Paradise”. But a more pointed change comes at the end of the second verse. In 1992, 2Pac rapped “this is not world peace / we tried your way and there was war in the streets”. In 2005, via the same kind of subtle splicing that lets him anachronistically call out Eminem and G-Unit elsewhere on the album, he ends the verse “Before we find world peace / We got to find peace and end the war in the streets.”
This shifts the meaning of the song in an important way. Part of the point of the original “Ghetto Gospel”, it seems to me, is that it’s a song that considers but moves past outside analyses of ghetto politics and life in order to advance Black self-reliance and community strength as the solution – “everybody needs a little help / on the way to relyin’ on oneself”. The title of the track is something literal – the good news from the ghetto, the way the experiences 2Pac is describing are proof that the community has the strength and resilience to deal with its own issues. And those outside analyses may even extend to God – the final verse on the original finds Pac praying but negotiating, defending his decisions and choices to God in the world he’s been given.
2Pac still asks “Lord, can you hear me?” at the end of 2005’s “Ghetto Gospel”, but there’s no negotiation with God on the table now. The new track is a lot more one-dimensional: it’s a plea for peace, both emphasised and ironised by the fact of the singer’s violent death, and framed as an important rap song along the lines of “Stan” and “Lose Yourself”. Elton’s sample, in the Dido slot, “peace to this young warrior without the sound of guns”, acts as a requiem for the man who’s rapping the rest of the track.
Whether this is poignant or clumsy – in the context of 2Pac’s life and work and death, and in the context of the charts in 2005, the height of the big-name big-sample rap era – is up to you. Personally, I land on clumsy. The original “Ghetto Gospel” is a bit of by-numbers early 90s rap that’s hardly 2Pac’s finest moment, but it shows his liveliness, his thoughtfulness, his defiant complexity. This version, an embrace of peace by a man who died by violence, sincerely elevates him into the most banal of binaries.
Score: 4
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