The difference between ‘All Eyez on Me’ and Tupac Shakur’s other albums
When Tupac Shakur released All Eyez on Me in February 1996, just seven months before he was murdered, people were shocked by his new direction. Unlike his previous albums that bore an undeniable political and socially conscious bent, this one was largely about the gangsta lifestyle—and it was powered by rage.
During the making of the album, Pac spoke to the LA Times journalist Chuck Philips about what was going on in his life at the time. He revealed that work on All Eyez on Me began immediately after he was released from jail in October 1995, and that it was going to be “full of, just, anger.” He characterised this anger as a reaction to all the negative attention he had been receiving in recent years.
Declaring that “life is not just beautiful,” Pac claimed that he always tried to capture all aspects of life in his work—but that, this time, anger was a dominant driving force. He believed that his critics had unfairly targeted him for his previous albums, asserting that his songs were violent celebrations of the thug lifestyle. He thought that was wrong, but, this time, he was going to give them exactly that.
“Now, I feel as though this album is something for them to sweat,” he said of his critics. “Before my album wasn’t even bad and they was calling me a gangster and just messing up my whole credit line and ruining my reputation.”
Pac referred to some key tracks from his early albums by way of example. “Look at my songs,” he said. “On the first album, ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby.’ On the second album, ‘Keep Ya Head Up.’ On the third album, ‘Dear Mama.’ Where is the killer music? Where is the make-a-kid-wanna-jump-off-a-bridge shit? I just don’t see it.”
But by this point in time, after a period spent in jail, Pac’s outlook on life had changed for the darker. All Eyez on Me, then, was a way for him to vent. It was about, “Getting everything I wanna say out since I can’t express myself in any other way. Plus I was locked down for eleven months so I gotta lot of stress and pressure to get up off my chest. I think I did it on this album.”
Tupac had come to feel increasingly paranoid and fed up with all the negative attention he was receiving, and he poured it into his album. Even in this interview, his shredded nerves were apparent. He believed that he was being punished for rapping about “some shit that’s really happening.”
“That’s when they started really kicking my ass for real,” he said of his critics targeting him. “The IRS, every cop everywhere, any kind of candidate wanna come. It was to the point I was having cases everywhere I went. People just bump into me and be like, ‘Tupac hit me.’”
Tupac felt like the world was against him, and he, in turn, was going to make the world deal with it. “They gon’ feel all eleven months of what I went through in this album,” he said. “I’m gonna hit ’em with nothing but trouble, but good trouble. Trouble that bring money don’t bring pain. All I’m doing is talking shit, and I should be allowed to talk as much shit as I want.”