For those of us old enough to have listened to 2pac before he was killed, let us, for simplicity just call us OG’s, it has been a somewhat frustrating experience to see how several rights holders have handled his musical legacy.
Unlike his contemporary first friend, then foe, Biggie Smalls, who also was shot at his commercial prime only a year after 2Pac, 2Pac left a vast collection of unpublished songs behind. This has also been the source of a long range of posthumous releases.
Official studio album releases made after 2Pac’s death are
R U Still Down? (Remember Me)
Still I Rise (with Outlawz)
Until the End of Time
Better Dayz
Loyal to the Game
Pac’s Life
With the exception for the first two, where a lot of the tracks were published in versions relatively similar to the way they were originally recorded, these albums contain heavily reproduced versions far from 2Pacs original vision of the songs, verses taken out of context, put in to entirely new beats, and combined with guest appearances from artists 2Pac had little to no interaction with while he was live.
This could sound like petty complaining from an OG who thinks rap music was a lot better in the 90’s, and simply does not like the new sound, but as all rappers know – you do not rap the exact same way to two different beats, even though the tempo is the same. You adapt your vocals to the beat you are rapping to. When you then keep the vocals, but completely change the beat, the result, musically, is a beat and a vocal track that flow together in a poorer way. The music sounds worse, plain and simple.
This is not to say rap music wasn’t better in the 90s – of course it was, but that is a different question.
A few years after 2Pac’s death, there were rumors of a planned multi-CD box from Death Row, named “The Vault”, collecting a lot of 2Pac’s unreleased originals, but the project unfortunately was shelved. That meant that the management and distribution of 2Pac’s original unreleased materials – often musically very much superior to the remixed versions that had been officially published despite perhaps being unfinished and technically less polished – was up to the rest of us.
Luckily, a lot of material was leaked. Early, a string of bootleg CDs were published with unreleased materials, usually named Makaveli 2, 3, 4, 5 etc., along with a lot of later bootlegs. These were not available in Norway, but at the time I had access to the internet at my university and could download a large string of tracks that were then distributed openly on 2Pac fan sites in mp3, but also at the time RealPlayers format. (The latter was actually preferable because of the comprrimation which at the time gave superior audio quality with low bandwidth, and I could fit 2-3 songs on a 1,44 MB floppy, while to download an mp3 and bring home I had to split it over 2 discs using winzip – ah those were the days, whan you had to work for it, and thus appreciated the music more.)
The access was however chaotic and nobody knew exactly how much was out there, and to a degree this is still the case. In a sense it has become even more difficult to navigate over the years, based on people snatching a 2pac vocal verse, adding their own mix to it and uploading it as a new 2Pac song, and lately AI-generated fake 2Pac racks.
I have been looking for a more or less complete list of original unreleased 2pac tracks, and have not been completely successful, but there are a couple of websites that have attempted to systematize this a bit. These are the best lists of original unreleased 2Pac material I have found, that are available now. They can be a good starting point to get an overview of the quite large amount of unreleased 2Pac tracks – many of them quite good, and many vastly superior to the mixes released officially.
The blog “2Pac : Archaeology of a Thug” has organized 2Pacs unreleased originals as a range of bootleg albums with track lists, listing a total of 39 suggested bootleg albums. Many of these of course also contain older versions of songs released during 2Pacs life and different versions of the same songs from different recording sessions.
But it is a very impressive compilation.
Where the tracks are available, the website has uploaded the bootlegs as Youtube playlists. If you are truly interested in having this music, I suggest you download them to your own harddrive, rather than gambling that they will stay online forever.
Tools that can download entire playlists and save just the audio for you from Youtube include JDownloader and YT-DLP (if you are not comfortable with command-line tools, there are GUI-versions of the latter like Lech YT-DLP). Just google them.
If you download the stuff they have collected you will have most of what is available. I can however not guarantee that all of the hundreds of tracks that can be found are actually originals, but I believe the vast majority is legit based on my previous experience scanning the internet for unreleased ‘Pac songs.
The only other website I have found over the years that is still online and has a smaller, but still relatively extensive and well-sorted collection of original unreleased 2Pac songs is the blog “The New Death Row Records“.
In addition to 2pac, this site also lists unreleased albums by a range of other Death row artists. The most interesting from this page is the listing “The original albuz 1-18”. Here they have done a similar job as the precious blog, and made a list of bootlegs systematically collecting unreleased originals. Althoug less extensive that the “Archeology” blog, it is still a good collection, and what may make this interesting for many is that the albums are not made available from Youtube, but in mp3 format via cyberlockers.
Unfortunately the blog has not been maintained for years, and quite a few of the links are dead, but quite a few also still work.
A final suggestion would be to look into the online archive site “Internet Archive”. Here you can also find uploaded quite a few collections that can be streamed or downloaded. The most interesting is perhaps a series of “original” versions of the posthumous studio albums, where the remixed tracks are replaced with originals. Do an audio search for “2Pac original”, or click here.
When capitalist logic makes record companies squeeze money out of dead artists by chopping, pasting and transforming their musical heritage beyond recognition, it is up to the rest of us to keep the true musical legacy alive.
Download and share.