and there is a time to dance." -Kevin Bacon, Footloose. that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. Your mother, also bomb-ass, would’ve been pleased."ĭance floors busy with bodies: "Ecclesiastes assures us. For example, if your friend’s mother passes away, you might try consoling him or her by commenting on the high quality of the event: "Susan, hi, I just want to say real quick that this is a bomb-ass funeral. Lots of opportunities for sex: If you are in charge of promoting tourism for your state, you should 100 percent include that your state has a higher sex rate per capita than other states, if that happens to be the case.īomb-ass hemp: "Bomb ass" is slang for "very good," and "hemp" is slang for "marijuana." I remember reading this thing about how when you want to add a new word to your vocabulary, you have to use it two times out loud, so I’d recommend that here for you so that you can get comfortable saying this. There are thirteen reasons you should visit California and celebrate California, according to Tupac and Dr. There’s a moment during Suge’s explanation where he basically congratulates himself for not blatantly stealing the whole song by allowing Dre to remain on it, and it’s easy to see how Suge eventually pile-drove Death Row into nothingness. Knight says that the song had been written for Dre, but since The Chronic had already been out, and since Tupac’s album was on its way, Suge thought the song should go to Tupac. Taylor says he and Dre made it at Dre’s house during a get-together, and then Tupac showed up and was in the studio so he recorded a verse for it. Dre at his house, while Knight tells some overly complex story about a stylist wearing a leather suit and that’s where the Mad Max theme for the video came from, or something), but they both agree on one point: It belonged to Dr. The parts that they quibble about are the parts you’d expect (Taylor says he helped piece together the track with Dr. One comes from Chris "The Glove" Taylor, who claims he helped produce the track (though he received no credit for it), and the other from Death Row’s cofounder and former CEO Suge Knight, who is like if an angry rhino began morphing into a human and then stopped halfway through and so that’s just how he was stuck. There are two conflicting stories on how he nabbed it. "California Love" was not originally Tupac’s song. It was a glimpse at what he was going to do as a proper superstar, and also pointed toward where Puff Daddy would eventually take rap.12
“California Love” gave him the wide-screen treatment we’d watch the Notorious B.I.G. Up to that point he’d mostly been an insular artist, with ideas and thoughts aimed in specific directions.
It was his biggest song figuratively, because of its commercial success, but also literally. You can imagine the sort of fervor that surrounded this song when it dropped. It was the first thing he delivered under Death Row, a label that was, at that moment, the biggest and baddest and most overwhelming in rap.Īnd his amazing film run from 1992 to 1994 ( Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim) stretched his name well beyond the parameters of just rap, and even just music. It was the first song from his new album, All Eyez on Me, which was coming behind Me Against the World, his most successful album to that point, commercially (it moved more than 3.5 million units) and critically ("Dear Mama" see page 106). But the insanity surrounding his court case at the time of his sentencing had grown his indestructible gangster myth tenfold, so Tupac getting out of prison was less him getting out of prison and more him rolling away the stone and stepping up out of the tomb. It was the first song Tupac released when he got out of prison in 1996, and that would’ve been gigantic all by itself. But it arrived to an almost unfathomably perfect orchestra of circumstance, and so it is endlessly important today, and forever, on earth and in heaven and anywhere else they listen to rap.