Album Review: Tupac Shakur – The Undisclosed Tapes

Since his death in 1996, hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur has had more albums released in his name than when he was alive. Friends and family of the rapper seem to be constantly finding new recordings that they deem suitable for selling to a slathering crowd of hungry music fans. And now, with The Undisclosed Tapes, there’s another entry to the list of posthumous albums in 2pac’s name.

Tupac Shakur, during happier (and aliver) days

In this new album, there’s a definite underlying sense that we are listening to Tupac the Man, rather than the rapper, the hip-hop star or MTV’s ‘Best MC of all time’. This is shown most clearly on the first track, entitled ‘Tha Milk (It’s Off)’. This piece of music displays Shakur at his most human, and was discovered by a former housekeeper who found it on an old answerphone tape. The track, in which 2pac informs his then housekeeper that the milk in his refrigerator is past its use-by date, is purely spoken-word, with music and beats added relatively recently by famed producer DJ R-Swipe. Its banality does not detract from a powerful and meaningful insight into this troubled star.

A far more uplifting track is ‘Shout Out.’ This piece of music is pure poetry, with sweeping strings in the background and the sound of polite applause as Tupac discusses the perils and benefits of being in a rock band. Taken from a recording of the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards when Shakur presented the award for Band of the Year, this track is full of hope and optimism. It shows no indication that the rapper would go on to die in a hail of bullets like that guy in Platoon.

One of the more controversial tracks on the album is ‘Earth and Fire,’ featuring guest vocals from D-Posse. That’s how the tracklisting describes the song, anyway. This is actually a recording from a D-Posse gig that was attended by Tupac in his younger years, and he is apparently audibly shouting from the crowd. While I don’t doubt that 2pac is part of the cheering, roaring audience, I do question his input in this track.

At 88 minutes long and featuring more than fifty tracks, it could be argued that this album is full of near misses and wasted opportunities. Case in point is the thirty second long track ‘Ain’t Mad At Cha: Intro and Mistake in First Line’. It shows what one of 2pac’s most beloved songs would have sounded like if the first line was “Change…oh, wait…I forgot the next bit…stop the tape…” Sadly, that’s where the song ends and we are left hanging as to how this would have affected the rest of the piece.

Despite accusations that the makers of this CD have finished scraping the bottom of the barrel and have now tunnelled through the bottom of the barrel into some ground-like substance that exists beneath our metaphorical container, there are some good moments on this recording. Whether this is enough to warrant purchase is another matter, but it should keep fans occupied while they wait for the forthcoming 2pac: The Complete Radio Ident Collection.

Tupac Shakur – The Undisclosed Tapes is released on Tuesday from Floggin’ a Dead Horse Records, at a cost of my respect for you. A special edition feature an accompanying DVD documentary features nothing you’ve never seen before and buying it makes you a prick.

The Imaginary Peer Review

Rapathy by Dr William Routledge
The National Journal of Musical Psychiatry, Vol. 21, pp138-179

Doctor William Routledge rose to prominence in the world of musical psychiatry with the publication of his paper on Serendipitous Intra-Subjective Rhyming Triplets. In this paper, he concentrated on the words ‘fly’, ‘high’ and ‘sky’, and the effect that their usage has on the overall mental well-being of middle-aged men in luxury cars. This effect became known as “Kravitz Satisfaction” and spawned an entirely new approach to musical mental studies. Now, several years in the making, Routledge has published the results into his study of Hip-Hop Disinterest Syndrome, or, as he calls it, ‘Rapathy’.

Dr. Routledge spent many years investigating the hip-hop scene, and found a disturbingly high amount of apathy spreading throughout the genre like a plague. As he says in the paper:

At first glance, the people I saw seemed to be enjoying themselves. Their hands
were in the air, and the people were waving them to the music. But something
wasn’t right. When I inspected this hand-waving more closely, it struck me:
These people were waving their hands like they just didn’t care.

This lack of concern on the part of the dancers prompted Routledge to study it further. He traced this disinterest back to 1979, when a little-known paper on the things that delighted rappers mentioned this worrying new trend in passing: “…Throw your hands high in the air…rockin’ to the beat without a care” (Mike, Hank & Gee: Rappers Delight, 1979). This first instance of rapathy received little coverage in the press, and even when it began to spread throughout the hip-hop world in the next twenty years, the public was not informed.

Routledge believes that rapathy could, if not adequately contained, spread throughout the music world. Pop music has already seen isolated cases (Carter, Dorough, Littrell, McLean and Richardson: Everybody (Backstreet’s Back), 1997 and Stevens et al: S Club Party, 1999), and it might not be long before country, gospel and even classical music are seeing people waving their hands in the air without giving a monkey’s.

The paper is both well-written and terrifying, with Routledge backing up all of his claims with evidence, both from his own research and from the studies of others. With all of this proof, it is certainly hard to argue that Rapathy exists in the hip-hop world. But while the experimental side of Routledge’s work is sound, the conclusions regarding the apathetic hand-waving are less so.

Worrying though it may be, rapathy does not seem to have any long-lasting effects. It is yet to be proven, for example, that the condition survives beyond the dance floor. In many cases, the dispassionate hand-waving has shown signs of extinction before the end of the current song. Routledge argues that waving one’s hands in the air without caring could lead to injuries both to oneself and others, and notes cases of accidental slapping that have lead on rare occasions to disco violence (see Jackson: Blood on the Dance Floor, 1997). It should be noted, however, that these are very rare, isolated cases, and are not indicative of listless limb shaking as a whole. Furthermore, Routledge’s most extreme claim, that rapathy could theoretically lead to accidental limb removal, is pure nonsense.

Rapathy is a valid study into the startling world of passive hip-hop arm movements, but Dr. Routledge needs to concentrate more on concrete, evidenced results, rather than outlandish conjectures. Will this mirror the success of his prior papers? Possibly not. But I await the release of his forthcoming work on the certainty of possession of a loved one (entitled She’s Your Baby, But Do You Mean ‘Maybe’?). Doctor Routledge’s body of work remains strong enough to weather the inclusion of several poorly thought-out claims.