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Question – Pick two media samples of the same form and explain how one has had a positive impact and the other has had a negative impact.

Whenever I think about media that can be interpreted both positively and negatively, I’m reminded of Tupac Shakur, one of my favorite hip hop artists of the early 90’s.

Tupac’s career was rife with conflict, as many people believed him to be an angel, while others saw him as someone who perpetuated negative stereotypes about black males and the black community. The reason being was that his music contained elements from all aspects of his life, both the good and the bad. And whenever people reference these two opposing sides of his career, most everyone consistently references these two songs: Keep Ya Head Up and Hit ‘Em Up.

Keep Ya Head Up appeared on Tupac’s second solo album was known foraddressing issues concerning lack of respect toward the female gender, especially poor black women. In the second line of his song he says, “I give a holla to my sisters on welfare. Tupac cares, if don’t nobody else care.”

This song came out when I was ten or eleven years old, and at the time it was often hard for me to fully relate to every lyric I heard in the music I listened to, but Tupac had ways of saying things in his music that drew me in to his message using more familiar ideas. One line I remember most was…

“And since we all came from a woman, got our name from a woman, and our game from a woman… I wonder why take from our women, why we rape our women, do we hate our women? I think it’s time kill for our women, time to heal our women, be real to our women. Cuz if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies that’ll hate the ladies that make the babies… and since a man can’t make one, he has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one.”

This line grabbed me because he referenced something universal that we can all relate to; the fact that we all come from women. And then he followed up with a prediction of what would happen if we don’t respect women, referencing babies and the birth a second time.

The message itself, Keep ya head up, is something that has always stuck with me since hearing this song, and I believe it is something that has contributed to my ability to keep a generally positive attitude during times of hardship and diversity.

Hit ‘Em Up was released as a single in 1995 and was considered to be one of most ruthless attack songs or “diss tracks” ever. In this song, Tupac immediately attacks his former friend, Notorious B.I.G. under the assumption that Biggie was a co-conspirator in the attack on Tupac’s life at a New York recording studio. Tupac also references a rivalry between the major west coast and east coast recording labels.

The song wasn’t released on one of Tupac’s albums, but it spread immediately. People everywhere were raving about how impetuous it was, and it quickly fueled an east coast / west coast rivalry that spread throughout the country like wildfire.

Suddenly, everything you heard in rap music was about which coast was better than the other. And it went far beyond boasting… people were physically attacked, property was vandalized, and some people were even killed. Many people believe that the song and the rivalry was part of what contributed to both Tupac’s and Biggie’s death. However, the truth of the matter is that this all started out of a rivalry between two record executives, who simply manipulated their artists into creating these songs to boost record sales. The saddest part about it is that Tupac even admitted that he only made a song as inflammatory as this as a means to sell records and make money… but it ended up having a much more negative impact.

These two songs, Keep Ya Head Up and Hit Em Up, have had such opposing impacts on hip hop culture that it’s hard to believe they’re from the same artist. However, it goes to show that music, no matter who’s creating it, can have an incredibly positive or negative impact on its listeners.