![]() The message delivered is that it is not wrong to treat all women this way. The problem this causes in society is the message it delivers to listeners and viewers. In videos, women are typically shown dancing around half naked and sometimes even worse. Women are constantly referred to as bitches, hoes, tricks, and many other degrading names. This is because of a common theme found in most hip-hop lyrics and videos. Just majorly disappointed.Russel Simmons, considered to be one of the pioneers of hip-hop music (Run DMC), says, “There is no question that sexism in hip-hop videos is a reflection of how sexist men are in the world today” (Byrd). As for the people banking on Tupac getting his own Straight Outta Compton-level movie, well – we ain’t mad at cha, All Eyez on Me. It’s biopic-making by numbers, and for anyone happy enough to simply see Shakur get the sinner-saint screen treatment, maybe that’s enough. This is a movie that’s content to superficially scroll through hits and misses and headlines without diving deeper. Tupac rapped about shooting his enemies and sleeping with their wives he also sang that “even as a crack fiend, Mama/you always was a black queen, Mama.” Any attempt at contextualizing why or how that mix of in-your-faceĪggression and sensitive hood journalism came from the same place gets buried under sloppy Which, for those of us who’ve been waiting for this for a long time, is a major letdown. Santana) enters stage right and we start slouching towards tragedy, All Eyez on Me already feels like it’s been looking at its subject with one eye closed. Or questionably staging an encounter with Ayanna Jackson, who’d accuse the musician of sexual assault, like a slo-mo R&B video. ![]() You want the movie equivalent of “Hit ‘Em Up.” You get something that would’ve been deemed unfit for Loyal to the Game.Īnd when the movie briefly allows Shipp to get onstage and drop a few verses, you wish it hadn’t skimped on the actual musical aspects in favor of half-baked attempts at pathos involving Shakur’s mother Afeni ( The Walking Dead‘s Danai Gurira.) Or having a didactic journalist (Hill Harper) play devil’s advocate with an imprisoned Shakur over everything from rap lyrics to responsibility, social consciousness to C. is a real sense of what made Shakur so vital – then and now – or any idea why we superfans and stans still rightfully look at his work as a hip-hop high point. As a bonus, you also get characters who exist solely to spout exposition and/or infomercial taglines (“Well, Interscope was founded as a haven for artistic expression!”) and the sort of clunky, nuance-free filmmaking that keeps pushing the Camp-o-meter into the red. Less a biopic than a pop-up Wikipedia page, All Eyez on Me covers the bases of Shakur’s story: the early schooling in Shakespeare and militant sloganeering, the formative mistrust of authority, his big break with the Digital Underground, the discovery of his voice, the near-derailment due to his shooting and scandals and incarceration, and the self-destructive free-for-all of the Death Row years. (Would that it were so simple: You can read a detailed history of the project’s long, winding and incredibly bumpy road to becoming a reality.) There was just one anxiety-inducing question that kept buzzing in the back of our skulls: Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend’s life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. ![]() ![]() It was never a matter of whether or not the 25-year-old musician deserved a biopic so much as why it took so damned long to make it happen. A hip-hop gamechanger, a revolutionary’s son, an actor, an ex-convict, a platinum-selling artist, a sensitive truth-teller, a “Thug Life” tattoo-sporting tough guy, a black man, a martyr – Tupac Shakur was all these things and more. ![]()
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