More prolific dead than alive (well, not really, but the amount of records issued by the Californian rapper after September 13, 1996, far outweigh the number issued before),
2Pac has -- mostly thanks to his mother,
Afeni Shakur -- come out with another release, ten years after his death. Despite the fact that
Pac's Life claims to be comprised of all (minus one verse) previously unheard material, most of the rhymes on the album have been floating around the Internet or on unofficial (and possibly illegal) bootlegs for some time now, which makes listening a little anticlimactic. This isn't to say that there is not some great material on
Pac's Life, because there is ("Watch and bear witness to the pleasures of participation/Separation and self-destruction, what's needed is unification," he spits in "Whatz Next"), but the power of
2Pac's words is often lost behind the modern production (from
Sha Money XL and
L.T. Hutton, among others) and new verses from artists like
Ludacris,
Lil Scrappy,
Ashanti, and
Young Buck. It's understandable that
Ms. Shakur and her collaborators want to continue to promote
2Pac and his music in the world, and that one way of going about this could be by modernizing the beats, but unfortunately it doesn't quite work here, and everything ends up sounding a bit commercialized, and a bit dull. There are still some bright spots on
Pac's Life -- he was too talented, and recorded so much to have it be otherwise -- that could be of some interest to fans and keep the album from being a total loss: "Don't Sleep" has a nice soft intensity, while the single "Untouchable" (produced and remixed by
Swizz Beatz and featuring
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony) has a great, catchy hook, and "Soon as I Get Home" is fantastic, and probably the best track on the album, mostly because the original production by
QDIII hasn't been changed at all; but still, this isn't enough to make the album good. All in all,
Pac's Life is a nice attempt, but it comes nowhere close to showing off his talent as
All Eyez on Me and
Me Against the World do, and ends up being kind of disappointing because of that. [The 2006 edition includes one bonus cut.] ~ Marisa Brown