Pac rides Mo Bee’s solid backdrop, beautifully. What the hell does that mean? And who is the “they” that says that? Even with his ludicrous opening line (that he also uses to begin the third verse), he does spit some strong bars on this one: “I’m sick of psychotic society, somebody save me, addicted to drama so even mama couldn’t save me”…”Going insane, never die, I live eternal, who shall I fear? Don’t shed a tear for me nigga, I aint happy here, I hope they bury me and send me to my rest, Headlines reading: “Murdered To Death”, my last breath”. Pac falls in love with words that start with P, as he potently plasters this song with a plethora of P words (see what I did there?): “They say pussy and paper is poetry, power and pistols”. If I Die 2nite – This is one of two tracks that the severely underappreciated Easy Mo Bee is credited for producing on MATW. Intro – Me Against The World opens with a standard drum beat and some emotional guitar licks (courtesy of Darryl Crooks) placed underneath a bunch of snippets taken from news reports about the Quad Studio shooting that Pac survived. It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to it from beginning to end, so let’s see how it sounds 25 years after its release. Me Against The World has always been my favorite 2pac album.
The album is universally considered Pac’s best work, and is often put on greatest of all-time list for hip-hop albums and all genres. Me Against The World would go double platinum and Pac would become the first artist to have a number one album on the Billboard 200 while serving a prision sentence (this would become a marketing strategy that several labels and artists would soon follow). Me Against The World would be released a month after Pac begin serving his sentence for sexual assault, which is why he wouldn’t appear in any of the music videos for the album’s singles. But through all the turmoil, Pac was still able to record music and would release his third solo effort, Me Against The World in March of 1995. He was charged and found guilty for assaulting Menace II Society co-director, Allen Hughes, in and out of court for sexually assaulting Ayanna Jackson (which he would eventually be convicted of and serve 9 months for in 1995), and to bring his already drama-filled year to an end, he was robbed and shot 5 times at Manhattan’s Quad Studios on November 30, 1994. Musically, Pac would bounce back nicely in ’94 with his crew, Thug Life and the Volume 1 album, but his personal life was in shambles. The rest of those posthumous albums come with asterisks), regardless of how commercially successful it was. is and will always be my least favorite 2pac album (fyi, I only count the albums from 2Pacalypse Now through The Don Killuminati as Pac’s catalog.
Thanks to its lackluster production and poor mixing, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.