2Pac is one in every of Hip-Hop’s most well-documented artists, but it surely looks like you’ve by no means actually heard each 2Pac story. Working example: we’re now getting a little bit unknown backstory on the late rap legend’s 1996 observe “Me and My Girlfriend.” A person on X (previously Twitter) shared a narrative about how his mother wound up making an look on “…Girlfriend.” The music famously options 2Pac rapping a couple of gun prefer it’s his romantic accomplice, and the observe opens with a girl’s high-energy portrayal of the feisty weapon.
X person @Evolving_Eric — who claims his father is Eric B. — shared a video along with his mom, recognized on YouTube as Virginya Slim, explaining her position within the music’s recording. A former Dying Row Information worker, she shared her preliminary interactions with 2Pac within the studio after she picked him up from a membership.
“All he needed to do was speak about this album that he was placing collectively, and this concept that he had for a music referred to as ‘…My Girlfriend,” she mentioned. “He gave me the idea and the concept and he was speaking about how he wanted to deliver the gun to life. It wasn’t going to be the identical if the gun didn’t have a voice.”
She’d tried to assist rent ladies for the voice performing wanted because the intro of the observe, however none of them labored.
“Engineers would come again to me per week later and say, ‘It didn’t work out, it wasn’t adequate, it didn’t have the fervour {that a} gun would have,’” she recalled. “So the album wanted to be turned in and the engineers had been like, ‘We nonetheless haven’t got the music finished.’”
2Pac apparently requested her to be on the observe whereas they had been speaking within the hallway.
“Truthfully, I used to be nervous, as a result of I’m working — I wasn’t making gangster music,” she mentioned. She determined to smoke a blunt and sort out the job.
“I ain’t even know I had that in me, y’all,” she now says. “I made all of the gun photographs up in my head, all of the pauses…and all of that was simply me performing it out.”
“Me and My Girlfriend” was featured on Pac’s multiplatinum 1996 album Don Killuminati: The 7-Day Idea. Although by no means launched as a single, the music has had enduring reputation and affect; with Toni Braxton transforming it for “Me and My Boyfriend” in 2002, and the music later famously interpolated for Jay-Z and Beyoncé‘s hit “‘03 Bonnie & Clyde.”