38. 2Pac - Ghetto Gospel (2004)

In the middle of the decade came this record, like a voice from the beyond, from the depths of the previous decade. Tupac Shakur was the ultimate nineties gangsta-rapper, the philosopher and poet of the style, combining the bleak reality of ghetto life with militant black politics and shameless hedonism. In the nineties, in accordance with the signs of the time, his records were negative in spirit, filled with despair, rage and anger. And that is also how he died, falling victim to the pointless feud between east-coast and west-coast hip-hop. His murder, and that of Notorious B.I.G a year later, were the lowest point which African-American pop has reached, from music that propelled the struggle for freedom and equality to music that turned man against his brother. But with hindsight, this was also the turning point, the wake up call that hip-hop needed. A lot of people pulled themselves together at that time, and turned black music and politics in a more positive direction, with the deaths of Tupac and Biggy serving as warning signs. By the middle of the next decade, we have reached a point where we can look back at Tupac's legacy and interpret it differently: not as a celebration of violence and hedonism, but as a call to transcend them and take another path.

This duplicity has always been a part of gangsta-rap. You can hear it as a giving up on the possibility of social advancement and an enthusiastic dive into the criminal world, but also as a reflection of a bad state, a warning to society against the results of not providing its members with hope. In this decade, hope came alive again, and you could hear Tupac's words differently. A lot of the stuff he recorded did not come out when he was alive, and in 2004 some of this material was produced by Eminem and released as an album, which reflected the more positive spirit. 'Ghetto Gospel' shows that Tupac had a gospel side, and brings the spirit of gospel into hip-hop. Gospel was always rooted in the hardships of black existence, but always expressed hope for a better world, and that's the spirit of this rap as well.

But the tone of the original Tupac rap is transformed on the record, and what transforms it is the sample. This is another change hip-hop went through due to the greater involvement of whites: while blacks tend to be more interested in the beat and sample mainly rhythms (or take a snippet from a record and loop it, making it part of the rhythm section), which become the foundation which the new record is built on, whites tend to listen mainly to melody and sample whole verses, which become part of the thematic structure of the new record. The sample here is taken from an Elton John record about a warrior who laid down his sword and passed into an era of peace, and it transforms Tupac's painful prayer into a hymn of victory and glory.