Eternal Through My Heart [Jan 2013]

So I’m migrating some of the stuff that doesn’t totally suck from Wordpress but there’s no easy way to do this than to copy/paste from eons ago. Nevertheless—

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“We’ve been traveling on this weary road // sometimes life can take a heavy load // But we ride it, ride it like a bullet, Hail Mary // We won’t worry everything will curry // Yes we free like the bird in the tree.”

I started getting into rap and hip-hop pretty late in the game, which is surprising to most people since that makes up most of my music collection. I can’t really explain what was the initial intrigue; I now attribute it to some sort of fixation on good beats and production ability. Through late high school and early college, I listened to a lot of mainstream hip-hop – mostly Southern – because, well, that’s what was getting airplay. You walk into a frat party in the fall of ’07 and the playlist is a rehash of “Crank That,” “Get Low,” “Snap Ya Fingers,” “Bartender,” …throw in some Luda tracks and call it a night. The intrigue’s also in how the music is easy to party to, chill to, turn off your brain to, stay awake to, etc.

I didn’t start listening to 90s/oldschool/underground hip-hop until maybe three years ago, when I incidentally heard Tupac’s “Hail Mary.” The sound’s different. I probably would never hear this shit at a party. In fact…damn, this sounds really, really dark.

I don’t know what it was, but I liked it. And since then, I started listening to rap for the lyrics, looked up regional slang and rappers’ histories, and started reading up on the background and culture that created gangsta rap. I’d finally found a subgenre interest, and it was somewhere in between angry/revenge-seeking lyrics and straight-from-the-heart verses. So when I looked up “Hail Mary,” I learned that Tupac’s album, “The Don Killuminati: The 7-Day Theory,” also Tupac’s final studio album, was posthumously released; the lyrics were written and recorded in three days and mixed in four. The album was never supposed to come out for commercial release, but ended up peaking on Billboard charts. What’s also interesting about this album is the stark contrast from Tupac’s other albums, introducing Tupac’s new stage name “Makaveli,” a name he picked up while reading Machiavelli’s “The Prince” in jail.

I digress; my point in writing this wasn’t to provide a seventeen-year-too-late album review. I am nowhere near qualified for that. The point was to articulate to myself why this song made the impact it did in my life, my listening habits, key takeaways, etc. Moreover, I’ll look at why rap/hiphop’s recurring themes of anger, vengeance, nostalgic reminders, etc. are so captivating, and what it’s taught me about art and my own life.

Tupac was always an emotional rapper; in his larger body of work, he took on Machiavellian ideals that “the ends justify the means.” In “Letter 2 My Unborn Child,” he says “Since I only got one life to live, God forgive me for my sins,” but never does he regret himself the decisions he’s made. The, after-the-fact song lyrics seem to justify not only the means, but the ends themselves. The extravagant lifestyle is justified by a need to get out of the ghetto, the violence justified by self-preservation and vengeance, and the misogyny justified by cynicism. And so, his general attitude focuses on the potential to succeed and training the mind to transcend previous circumstances.

I was talking with a friend earlier who has never been able to appreciate rap (namely gangsta rap) because it propagates a lifestyle he doesn’t condone or relate to. But instead of focusing on the lifestyle, I focused on the rawness of what was being communicated. They’re real people, real stories, and real experiences – things that we feel day-to-day, but never act upon. That rushing feeling of anger? Nobody reached out to me better than the big faces of gangsta rap. As for the feelings of vengeance, when Tupac reminds me “revenge is the sweetest joy,” well hell, I never did anything about it, but he did. And I listened to it. Though I couldn’t relate at all to the actions done, I sure could relate to those very raw emotions. To me, art wasn’t to be idealized versions of the human experience, it was to depict every flaw, every ugliness, every moment of reflection and clarity that pervaded “the solitary mind of a madman.”

I’d seen the entire spectrum of Tupac’s progression as a rapper through his discography, initially beginning as a messiah of the ghetto, throwing out some of the first pro-feminist verses, delving into deep introspection, and finally, demonstrating lyrical genius via allegories that placed him in the roles of a visionary, a philosopher, a thinker, and a mover of the community he came from. And through listening to his discography, I grew with him. I was forced to think of issues I hadn’t before, confront my own feelings, lean on real, true-to-life experiences – things I could never see myself doing in my life, but someone had done them. And I felt them. At once, I saw the music for what it was, straight from the heart – angry, hateful, vulgar, uplifting, inspiring, vulnerable, full of love, storytelling, staying true to yourself. I might never be able to relate to these stories, but I may be able to endure. This isn’t unique to Tupac, to gangsta rap, to rap and hip hop in general, or even to music. You see things straight from the heart in every form of art, every form of storytelling, and you decide what it means to you. And through “Hail Mary,” I learned what art means to me.

One life to live, but I’ve got nothing to lose.