Pac’s Life

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Album Release Date: November 21st, 2006
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Interscope Records / Amaru Entertainment

 

Ten years after Tupac's death, the Estate of Shakur (owned and operated by his mother, Afeni Shakur) decided to release yet another album.  This time around, Amaru Entertainment has much to prove in terms of the quality of Tupac's work because of the previous album; in which the quality of the work and production done was not only poorly done, but failed to keep fan's interests much longer than a quick scan through the tracks. So was this album's release the Holy Grail of Tupac releases fans have been wanting to see for years now? Not exactly… read on.

First, either there is a problem with production, or communication within Amaru Entertainment because it seems that nobody has an idea what the other person is doing. Point in case would be Makaveli.com contacting three seperate contacts at Amaru Entertainment to obtain information during production of this album, only to get two seperate answers and one of them continued to ignore our emails.  Apparently either they have misinformed information or they simply didn't have an answer to not just the plethora of questions fans have written in to Makaveli.com to have answered, but apparently real simple questions as well.

They say anybody can tell the production value of an album by the time and money spent on obtaining the services of creditable people on an album. In this case and point, Amaru Entertainment decided to go with some no-name people on the album, and less known production artists. It's no secret that in the past, Amaru Entertainment has op-out of using the original tracks, beats, and artists on Tupac's recorded material, but eventually you must come to decide if that poor quality of music is his vocals, or the half hearted remix with some artist who would have never had any dealing with Tupac, if he were still alive today.

On the positive note, it's great to have yet another Tupac album, even if everyone has already heard the vocals used on these tracks before. Tupac was a huge influence to many people around the world, and the fact that we have the chance to hear music a decade after his death is still a blessing to any fan. The drawback on this album however comes from the numerous remixes used to fill tracks on this album. It's something Amaru Entertainment is notorious for doing on Tupac albums, but it feels like a quick copy/paste job to try and fill track slots they'd otherwise not have.  Who needs to hear 3 different remixes on a 13 track album, and the only difference is the chorus or guest artist? Why they decided to put Snoop's verse of Pac's Life at the end of the album , and not use him in the single is a question we'd love to hear explained, since everyone knows that Snoop & Tupac on a single radio joint  = huge pre-release hype.

One outstanding mention should be Fatal's perfect performance on Dumpin'. To be honest, Fatal never was that great on the MIC, nor were most of the Outlawz, but almost all of them strated to hold their own years after Tupac's death. Fatal, who had a very hard time keeping the flow of his verses in sync with the beat in pervious albums, nails this one right on the head.  We don't know if it was the time in the pen or just acceptance of one's limit of talent, but whatever it was, Fatal found his calling.  On that same note, our rating of this album was originally a 2/5 stars, but because of Fatal's performance on Dumpin', we bumped the final rating to a 3/5.

In conclusion, we loved the idea of a new Tupac album, and even a decade after his death, a new album always seems fresh and lifting. However, we can't help thinking that perhaps our own anticipation for another Tupac album outweighed the actual quality of the production on this release. If you're a Tupac fan who must own everything in his catalog, than you'll want to pick this up if you haven't already; otherwise, you might find better albums out there from other artists.