Amazing Breakdown of "Against All Oddz" (NEW INFO)

Found it on Reddit by someone

I find this really interesting....

The excerpt for All Eyez On Me from my upcoming Tupac listener's guide that I posted in last week's essential thread was relatively successful. I therefore thought it might be a good idea to share an entry for a specific song on Throwback Thursday. I have a strong feeling that few of you are interested in this or will see this, but I hope that those of you who do will learn something from it. Feel free to ask me any questions relating to the song or its content in this thread. Here's the draft of my entry for "AGAINST ALL ODDS:

"The realest shit [Tupac] ever wrote," "Against All Odds" is one of the most infamous diss tracks Tupac recorded in the midst of his war against Bad Boy Records and East Coast artists like NaS and Mobb Deep. It is also the most revealing - Tupac pulls no punches as he expounds on his beefs and identifies the people he believed were responsible for his sexual assault charge in 1993 and the armed robbery he survived at New York's Quad Recording Studios in 1994.
"Against All Odds" was recorded at Can-Am Studios one night in the late summer of 1996. At the beginning of the session, Tupac spoke briefly with producer Hurt-M-Badd regarding the type of beat he wanted. "I need a war song. I wanna go to war," he instructed before leaving the room. About an hour later he returned to listen to what Hurt had come up with. "It's aight. You know what it needs? This bassline," he said before playing Cameo's "The Skin I'm In." Hurt quickly replaced the bassline and Tupac smiled, "This is it!" He went in the booth and energetically recorded his vocals, kicking over the music stand and hitting the microphone. "Uh-oh, here we go again," Hurt recalled thinking upon hearing Tupac's reckless verses.

Tupac opens "Against All Odds" like a general at war - "21 gun salute - dressed in fatigues, black jeans, and boots / I disappeared in the crowd, all you seen was troops." He wastes no time in dropping rhetorical bombs on his rap industry enemies, taking shots at NaS for biting, alluding to Dr. Dre's alleged homosexuality, and dismissing Mobb Deep, all within his first few bars:
"This little nigga named NaS think he live like me / Talk about he left the hospital, took five like me / You livin' fantasies, nigga, I reject your deposit / We shook Dre's punk ass, now we out of the closet / Mobb Deep wonder why a nigga blowed them out / Next time grown folks talkin', nigga, close your mouth."
Tupac then sets his sights on Bad Boy's CEO, Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, for failing to respond to Death Row CEO Suge Knight's offer to stage a pay-per-view boxing event featuring bouts between Bad Boy and Death Row artists ("Let's be honest, you a punk or you would see me with gloves"). He refers to an August 1995 Vibe magazine interview Combs gave in response to Tupac's jailhouse proclamation that "Thug Life to me is dead" ("Remember that shit you said in Vibe about me being a thug?"). In that interview, Combs taunted Tupac, exhorting, "if you gonna be a motherfuckin' thug, you gots to live and die a thug . . . There ain't no jumpin' in and out of thugism." Tupac also reveals that he is not being entirely candid in his first verse, suggesting there are skeletons in Puffy's closet he would later reveal ("You can tell the people you roll with whatever you want / But you and I know what's going on"), which he does toward the end of the song ("Puffy gettin' robbed like a bitch"). He saves the first verse's cheapest shot for last, comparing old school rappers who criticized him (like De La Soul) to washed-up boxer Larry Holmes ("All you old rappers tryin' to advance / It's all over now, take it like a man / Niggas lookin' like Larry Holmes, flabby and sick / Tryin' to player hate on my shit, you eat a fat dick").
In his second verse, Tupac moves his crosshairs from industry enemies to the people he believed were responsible for his sexual assault charge and the Quad Studios ambush. He accuses "Haitian Jack" (Jacques Agnant), his co-defendant in the sexual assault case, of being a government informant and promises revenge against "Jimmy Henchman" (James Rosemond), the drug dealer / music manager who ordered the Quad Studios robbery. Tupac vows to "destroy everything [his enemies] touch," suggesting that his beef with Bad Boy may have been a proxy war directed at New York gangsters who were backing Puffy's label. He closes his bold second verse by emphasizing the seriousness of his threats via an allusion to the Mob Pirus, the Blood gang Suge Knight was affiliated with ("Fuck the rap game / Nigga, this M-O-B! / So believe me, we enemies").

Tupac shifts his focus back to rap adversaries on his third verse, hurling insults at Puffy and his former friend, Randy "Stretch" Walker, a producer/rapper who was with Tupac in the Quad Studios elevator when he was attacked. By the time "Against All Odds" was recorded, Stretch was already dead, gunned down in Queens on the one year anniversary of the Quad Studios robbery. While Tupac denied any involvement in Stretch's murder ("Switched sides / Guess his new friends wanted him dead"), Greg Kading, the former LAPD lead investigator of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murder, has related reports that Stretch's killer was a hit man flown into New York from Los Angeles, suggesting that the timing of Stretch's death may not have been a coincidence. Like Tupac's, Stretch's killer has never been apprehended.
Tupac ends his third and final verse with a venomous tirade against New York rapper NaS, who he accuses of various hip hop crimes. According to Tupac, NaS is an impostor who stole rap legend Rakim's lyrical style ("you heard 'My Melody' . . . tryin' to sound like Rakim") and plagiarized Tupac's life story ("read about my life in the papers . . . now you want to live my life"). Behind this public hatred was a private admiration. Tupac was a huge fan of NaS' debut album, Illmatic, and was inspired to write "Me and My Girlfriend" after hearing NaS' "I Gave You Power," an anthropomorphic first-person narrative told through the "eyes" of a handgun. He made peace with NaS in New York's Bryant Park on September 4, 1996 and even listened to NaS' sophomore album, It Was Written, as he made his fateful trip to Las Vegas for the Tyson-Seldon fight three days later. According to Suge Knight, Tupac intended to remove the NaS disses from the Makaveli album but died before he could do so. In a magazine interview after Tupac's death, NaS admitted crying when he first heard "Against All Odds."

"Against All Odds" is one of the most unsettling songs in Tupac's catalogue. Few songs in hip hop history so recklessly blur the lines between rap music and the street. What repercussions Tupac would have suffered for recording it will never be known (he rhymes in the third verse that he'll "probably be murdered for that shit that [he] said") - he was killed before it was released in November 1996. Nevertheless, "Against All Odds" remains the greatest narrative of the East Coast - West Coast war on wax and is strong evidence of Tupac's obsession with revenge in the last year of his life.