Me Against the World

Yeah.

Hey, what's up? My name's Jason Patterson, comedian, and my favorite album of 1995 would be Tupac, Me Against the World.

It was released when he was in prison.

First artist to have a number one album while they were in prison, and it's a very personal album, talking about himself, and it's one of his best work.

I felt that's when he was at his peak, and yeah, it spoke to me a lot.

So that's my favorite album of 1995, Tupac Shakur, Me Against the World.

If you will excuse this slightly weird hickledy-pickledy path we're taking, I will give you my number five.

Yes.

Pac went to p- went to my middle school.

I always throw in Me Against the World.

That's what I do.

Those the five.

What makes this record so interesting is where it lands in Pac's evolution.

It dropped less than six months before Me Against the World, and honestly it feels like a bridge between the Pac we heard on his first two albums and the artist he was about to become.

Uh, the socially conscious and political Pac is still there though, but on Thug Life you can hear the edges getting sharper, the music gets darker, the street narratives become heavier, and that more aggressive, fatalistic side of Pac starts moving to the forefront.

In a lot of ways, this is where you can hear the transformation happening in real time and, you know, you go back and listen to those first two albums and you can still hear a large, uh, extremely early '90s influence on his delivery, on, on the beats.

We're talking with Colin Asher about his fascinating book, The Midnight Special, The Secret Prison History of American Music.

It takes us to Tupac Shakur, Me Against the World.

You can't miss the sort of irony in a sense that tupac's murderer is on trial um sort of as we record this interview so who was tupac shakur and tell me about his album me against the world

Yeah, Tupac Shakur, I mean, hopefully most of your listeners know the name.

Maybe they know him more for the image than for the reality and the music.

So that's the beginning of his life, which is a pretty remarkable story on its own.

But then, of course, his story gets even more remarkable because when he's still quite young, he becomes massively famous in his own rights.

I guess we'll fill in the blanks between Birth and Me Against the World, but Me Against the World is the album of his that I chose to focus on because it's the first album in American history to go number one while its creator is in prison.

He's found guilty and sentenced to at least a year and a half in prison.

Just two weeks after he's locked up, Tupac releases an absolute banger of an album, Me Against the World.

Like much of Tupac's music, the album has a prophetic sadness to it.

On the single So Many Tears, Tupac raps about seeing his own death.

I love Pac, right? Like, and I love, like, a lot of what the meaning behind his music was.

No AI is ever going to make something as passionate as Me Against the World or some shit like that.

It's just not.

The AI is not going to make Dear Mama.

I'm fucking all eyes on me, but...

Oh, it's Me Against the World.

I'm sorry.

Me Against the World is actually the album that's in the picture that Pac sent.

Me Against the

World.

The older I get, when I was younger, I was like, ah.

Yeah, mad skips.

Strictly for my niggas, that's what's poppin'.

Me against the world, that's what's poppin'.

All eyes on me, that's what's poppin'.

Machiavelli, that's what's poppin'.

Incredible album, and to me, and this is just how I feel, Eazy-E will always be king of the West Coast.

If anybody want to challenge that or debate that, That's cool, but, you know, as a youngin', me growin' up and comin' up at a certain time, and to this day, I feel that EZ is the king of the West, and Revisit, EZ does it.

Another album that I would like people to revisit is Pre-Death Row Pre-Me Against the World, pre-Double CD, pre-This and Everybody on the West Coast.

I would challenge everybody to revisit Tupac Shakur's greatest album, which is Me Against the World.