Tupac Shakur releases 'Dear Mama'

Why it matters

"Dear Mama" came out as a single on February 21, 1995, the lead single from Tupac's Me Against the World. The album would drop the next month, while Tupac was on Rikers Island. The song is exactly what its title says: a four-and-a-half-minute letter from Tupac to his mother Afeni, addressing her struggles raising him (she was on crack for years) and his understanding, now that he was twenty-three, of what she had carried. The song was a commercial hit. It went platinum. More importantly, it is one of the only mainstream rap records of the 1990s that openly thanked a working-class Black mother for her sacrifice, in those words, without irony or distance. The Library of Congress added "Dear Mama" to the National Recording Registry in 2010, the first hip-hop record by an individual artist to receive the designation. Afeni Shakur was alive then. She heard her son's thank-you note get added to the official record of American music. You should hear the song. Most of the rap songs about mothers that came after this one (and there are many) descend in some way from it.