There's a moment near the end of "Playa Cardz Right (Male)"-- one of 13 "new" songs on Pac's Life-- where Tupac Shakur has a conversation with Ludacris. Luda rose to fame years after Shakur was murdered, and the two probably never met, but there they are on wax, giggling banalities about their friends. It's not a real conversation, of course. Years ago, Tupac was just finishing off a track with a minute or so of adlibs, so Ludacris is just responding to the stuff Pac has already said, putting all his acting skills to work so that it can sound like these two guys were in the same room together at some point. The effect is weirdly asskissy, like Tupac couldn't give a shit what Ludacris has to say, like he just goes on talking anyway without bothering to acknowledge the guy constantly agreeing with him. Tupac: "Castro is a straight gorilla pimp." Ludacris: "Yeah, my homeboy I20's the same way, man!"
Pac's Life is the sixth posthumous 2Pac album, not counting soundtracks or reissues or greatest hits albums. He's been dead for 10 years, and he's released more albums since his death than he put out when he was alive. That means the enormous well of unreleased material he left behind has been pretty well drained, and we're not going to learn much about him from new records. Instead, these albums might tell us a thing or two about the rap landscape into which they're being released. Plenty of the contributors to Pac's Life are too young to have had any meaningful contact with Tupac during his lifetime, and when they show up on the same track as the man, they're paying tribute. Rappers who depict themselves as kings of the world suddenly become bubbly sycophants. After all, none of them can ever hope to get anywhere near the levels of credibility as someone who died at the age of 25, who was riddled with bullets more than once before dying, who shot two police officers and didn't do any time for it, who declared war on an entire coast, whose 73 million records sold make him the biggest-selling rapper of all time. None of Tupac's posthumous collaborators can compete with him, so they just compare themselves to him. On the title track, T.I. Says, "Lived by the same rules, so minus the tattoos/ We the same sort of dude with the same short fuse." For T.I., that's humility.
But Pac's Life doesn't exactly pay tribute to the actual life of Tupac Shakur. It's about the legend of the unrepentant thug who was too uncontainable to live. The problem is that that legend is way less interesting than the actual life of Tupac Shakur, someone who studied Shakespeare as a child before running away from home, who rocked a bathrobe and a shower cap onstage as a backup dancer for Digital Underground, who wrote moving tributes to pregnant teenagers when he wasn't rapping about murdering their brothers. Tupac contained multitudes, and he gleefully contradicted himself at every turn. But Pac's Life presents an image of Tupac as nothing more than a grim-faced thug, and that's not really much of a tribute.
Of course, even when he's barking nihilistic clichés, Tupac's voice is still a deep, heavy sneer, and it sounds great over Swizz Beatz' thundering drums and sputtering guitars on "Untouchable (Swizz Beatz Remix)". But most of the tracks on Pac's Life are low-budget synth-preset bullshit, like LT Hutton's treacly synth fluff on the title track or Sha Money XL's tinkling quiet-storm pianos on "Playa Cardz Right (Male)". The guest-spots haven't been chosen with much care, either; we get an inexplicable grab-bag of superstars (Luda, T.I., Snoop Dogg) and nobodies (Nipsey Hussle, Jay Rock). Tha Outlawz, Pac's group of protégés, show up more than once, and that might confer some sort of legitimacy on the project, but they're still a shitty group of rappers. To say that Tupac himself is the best thing about these tracks isn't to pay him a huge compliment. It's sort of fun to predict who might sound fit to hold a track with the man (Young Buck) and who won't (Chamillionaire), but that's not enough of a reason for this mess to exist. Pac's Life is just another cash-in, the latest in a long line.
