2Pac’s third album, Me Against the World, was released on March 14th, 1995, while the rapper served a prison sentence for sexual abuse. It became his first full-length to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. In light of its 20th anniversary, Consequence of Sound’s Michael Madden, Jill Hopkins, Brian Josephs, and Will Hagle revisit the album to discuss where it fits in 2Pac’s discography and just how influential it’s been in the two decades since its release.
Michael Madden (MM): There’s something daunting about having to write at length about a single 2Pac album, to risk focusing too much on just one body of work. Hip-hop has arguably never seen a more complex, conflicted rapper, and seemingly all of him made it on record at some point. He was killed at 25, but he recorded so much music that you could believe he lived another decade. Though he was often dubbed a gangsta rapper, he excelled at everything from gentle introspection to incisive social commentary to (yes) unrepentant tough talk. The impact he had on his genre, if not pop culture as a whole, extends to this day. It’s easiest to look at his achievements as one vast sum, just to nod and say, yes, 2Pac was everything to hip-hop and maybe more.
Still, I think Me Against the World is the album that most quickly and cleanly gets to the heart of who 2Pac was as a man — and not just because it’s half as long as his other masterpiece, 1996’s All Eyez on Me. Right off the bat, the intro (a stream of news clips about his legal ordeals) and “If I Die 2Nite” paint him as troubled, a crucial development given that he was in prison at the time. It’s an album that’s short on hardcore rap appeal, and I like to think that if you were to listen to Me Against the World and All Eyez on Mewithout knowing for sure when one ends and the next begins, it’d be easy to tell that “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”, All Eyez’s menacing opener, starts a new chapter. That’s no complaint, though, because 2Pac didn’t need to show every side of himself at once. Without Me Against the World, his legacy as it stands today wouldn’t so strongly emphasize his humility.
