Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
Last night, in the time that I would normally spend typing something up for this site, I ended up watching Tupac Resurrection (not to be confused with the "Holla Back Exclusive" Tupac Resurrected?). If you happened to turn on VH1 at any point over the weekend, there's a good chance the movie was playing. It was a fairly well done documentary, worth checking out if only to see the homemade video of Tupac and Jada Pinkett dancing and lip-synching to Will Smith's Parents Just Don't Undersand. There were also several clips from MTV interviews with Tabitha Soren, and maybe it was just me, but it looked like Pac had a bit of a crush on her.
Like a lot of people, I think Pac was overrated as a rapper -- any rapper who has a college class devoted to his rhymes is, by definition, overrated -- but I will admit I still bump 2Pacalypse Now from time to time. The majority of the stuff that has been released after his death has been painful to listen to, though. As much as I criticize the Biggie Duets album, that thing is a classic compared to the annual posthumous 2Pac releases.
I've always thought what he had to say in interviews was a lot more interesting than anything he put into a song. It didn't matter whether he was talking about working with Janet Jackson (who demanded he take an AIDS test before she would do a love scene with him) or his time in jail or his views on politics, his interviews were always worth watching. Here's a 15 minute interview with 2Pac, done by Tabitha Soren, which includes a discussion of what jail was like for him.
A couple of random Tupac tracks from mixtapes:
Tupac and Nas: Let's Fight
Tupac and Redman: Throw Ya Gunz Up
While I was watching the movie, I was messing around with photoshop and made a shirt based on his Thug Life tattoo. You can see it here. I didn't make an exact replica, because I have a feeling there would be some copyright violation involved with that. Anyway, I have someone making a copy of the shirt. If the final product ends up looking decent, I might give away a few of them. Keep an eye out next week for that.
8/14/2006 10:17:03 AM posted by Fresh