Tupac's 'All Eyez on Me': The LA Weekly Word Cloud [NSFW]
West Coast Sound has been analyzing classic Los Angeles albums for the past six months by creating word clouds from the lyrics. We've tackled Black Flag's Damaged, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton, Guns 'n Roses' Appetite for Destruction and, most recently, just for kicks, the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird." Got a classic album you'd like to see analyzed? Put it in the comments section.
The lyrics to Tupac Shakur's 1996 classic L.A. gangsta rap album All Eyez on Me take up 63 pages of text when you cut and paste them into a Word document. That's a lot of words, basically a novella, and within those words are a snapshot of a moment in time when Los Angeles was recovering from Rodney King and the riots, when the gangsta rap subgenre had reached its apex. The double CD, consisting of "Book One" and "Book Two," was released on Suge Knight's Death Row Records, and contains Tupac's biggest hit, "California Love." Eyez went on to sell ten million albums. It's a masterpiece of alienation, fear and, yes, joy, written by a man who, seven months after its release, would be shot and killed in Las Vegas. His murder remains unsolved. 
All Eyez on Me, which was released fourteen years ago tomorrow, is a recording with 20,000 words (20,056, to be exact) and features cameos by, among many others, Dr. Dre, E-40, Nate Dogg, George Clinton, Jodeci, Method Man, Redman, Snoop and Rappin 4Tay. There's a lot of cussing on the album, for sure, as you'll see from the word cloud that we created from it -- a cloud that nearly crashed the Wordle program that created it.
After the jump, the amazing All Eyez on Me word cloud.
Randall Roberts
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