30 June 2005
The UK had two posthumous chart-topping acts in 2005: Elvis Presley with three number ones and Tupac Shakur with one. In Ireland only the 2Pac single made the top spot. Of course, some would dispute whether those Elvis or Tupac releases could be called ‘posthumous’, but that’s another story. The post mortem cult of Tupac has been a strangely maudlin affair. I’ve seen T-shirts on sale at street markets and worn by Italian summer-school students which depict him less as the ’90s US rapper who made ‘California Love’ and more as a martyr for our sins – a ’00s Jim Morrison.
Worse than that, ‘Ghetto Gospel’ posits Tupac as a ’00s Diana. After all, it’s his rapping mixed with an old mawkish piano ballad by Elton John repurposed as a funereal celebrity tribute, whose overwrought quasi-spiritual lyrics also chime with ‘Candle In The Wind 1997’ in carrying ‘Jerusalem’-esque hints of bucolic Christ-like divinity: “Those who wish to follow me / I welcome with my hands / And the red sun sinks at last / Into the hills of gold” Tupac’s own lines are just as bad: cliches about bag ladies and pregnant crack addicts, at the level of ‘In The Ghetto’ by Tupac’s fellow 2005 chart-topping daisy-pusher-upper Elvis, all slathered with a Central Casting gospel choir. Perhaps this is also a ’00s ‘Another Day In Paradise’.
‘Ghetto Gospel’ is a tasteless, shameless cash-in on the mythologising of a dead rapper. Who could possibly be responsible for this? Why, it was mixed and produced by Eminem, whose name is the hallmark of exploitation and crassness. Perhaps Tupac wasn’t dead after all, since going by this Eminem would surely have dug up the corpse and sold tickets to view it. Instead, we get this sonic Disgraceland.
