Writing About 2Pac In Los Angeles, A Place It Turns Out He Isn’t From

dcpierson:

I wanted to write about listening to 2pac in Los Angeles.  It was an idea I’d had for a while and this afternoon I’d written the requisite 750 words of the long thing I’m writing right now, the 750 words I must write on it every day in order to go to bed having pleased the gods, permitting me to sleep the sleep of the just, or so I decided like a week ago after listening to a bunch of a podcast I love called Back To Work and seeing the Jay Reatard documentary and thinking a lot about productivity and death. 

            One of the reasons I wanted to write about listening to 2pac is, I’d never really listened to 2Pac, and thinking “Hey, I can write about this” is a great way to get myself to do anything.  It seemed like bad music snob policy to not have engaged at all with an artist that looms so large over a genre I love.  Also, it seemed like the kind of thing I might like to read. 

            I’ve always been more of a Notorious BIG guy and at some point, I think during college, when I had a lot of time to take all-encompassing stands like this because they were fun to drunkenly explain at parties and I could fight off the gnawing dread of knowing I will never be able to hear all of music by loudly proclaiming “Ah, but I have good reason for dismissing broad swaths of it out of hand,” I decided that loving Biggie meant I couldn’t love 2pac.  I would repeat some thing somebody told me once about on the song that Pac and Biggie were both on with Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony, Biggie was versatile enough to rap at the same insanely fast cadence as Bone Thugs, while they had to slow the beat down because Tupac couldn’t adjust his one style, as proof that Pac was less legitimate than Biggie.  I had lots of half-remembered facts gleaned from Biggie biographies to do what I felt was backing this up.  I felt it was very East Coast of me to prefer one to the other so far as to entirely exclude one from my listening diet, and as I was not from the East Coast but I was living there, it seemed very important to me to be as East Coast as humanly possible all the time.  Also: Biggie is fucking great and there are few things I like more than his music.

            Then I moved to Los Angeles and at some point I thought “I should engage with the musical legacy of 2Pac.”  And yes, I thought of it more or less in exactly those words, and I thought it in all sincerity, because I think it is important to provide yourself with constant mental of examples of why you are not the kind of person that will survive society’s fast-approaching collapse into barbarism.  It could be a very interesting  way to talk about both his music and living in LA, because at the time, I thought Tupac was from LA, which he wasn’t, he was from Oakland. 

            Anyway, today after finishing my pages, I stand up and think “I should get lunch” and also think “Hey, I should go get a 2Pac CD and drive around and do that thing where I listen to Tupac and write about it.”  I immediately remember the many things I have been telling myself I would do with a rare unscheduled weekday, chores like getting my lapsed health-insurance situation untangled so that I could see my doctor about a nagging health thing that I have become unreasonably yet unshakably convinced is four types of cancer splitting a timeshare in my guts.  But driving around and listening to 2Pac and then writing about it seems like fun and I have been out of town for some portion of all of the past four or five weeks and I think hey, you know what, I’ll treat myself to some fucking off.  And it won’t really be fucking off, because I’ll be writing about it.

          I get in my 2003 Jetta, which I haven’t had washed since I got it three years ago and thus, in addition to a ton of dust, it still has the writing on the upper-right-hand corner of the windshield from when it was briefly repossessed after I forgot to make my car payment for four months straight, because there is nothing I like better than letting my real-world obligations, which are relatively simple to take care of, become monstrous intractable problems while I neglect them because I’m busy making stuff up.  I drive to the Sunset/Vine area and park in the Arclight parking structure.  I cross the street to Amoeba Records and go in and find “2Pacalypse Now” in the used section.  I use my iPhone to confirm that this was in fact 2Pac’s first album (it was) because I have a music-snob thing where I don’t want to start with the greatest hits, I want to start at the beginning even if it isn’t the full flower of the artist’s talents or necessarily the best introduction to the work because hey, there’s no way I won’t have the wherewithal to go through their entire catalogue, I will always be as interested in this as I am standing here in the record store right now.  I also get Prince’s 1979 self-titled album.  I go across the street to Tendergreens and eat a tuna nicoise salad while reading a self-help book on my iPhone.  My friend and fellow comic Hampton comes by the table and says “hi” to me.  He asks what I got at Amoeba and I hand him the two CDs. 

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2 months ago  /  61 notes  /  Source: dcpierson