The Unlikely Friendship Between Tupac and MC Hammer
Was Tupac friends with MC Hammer? It sounds unlikely on paper. 2Pac was gangsta rap. MC Hammer was family-friendly. To the casual ’90s hip hop fan, Tupac and MC Hammer would have been an odd pairing in the ’90s rap game. Truth is, the two shared a deep connection that began in Oakland, California.
Tupac Shakur moved to the Bay Area as a teenager after attending the Baltimore School for the Arts. MC Hammer, an Oakland native, sold over 10 million copies of Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em in the U.S. alone — north of 18 million worldwide. Hammer bought mansions, horses, and his own fleet of cars. By 1996 he was broke and signed to Death Row Records, the label that was home to his friend 2Pac.
Death Row was run by another man Hammer knew — Suge Knight. As part of his deal with the label, Tupac was required to write material for other Death Row artists, and one of them was Hammer. Pac wrote and produced songs for an entire MC Hammer album called Too Tight, named after its Tupac-penned title track. The project was shelved and never released after Pac was killed in September 1996.
For years the Tupac–MC Hammer album was just a rumor. Then in 2008, footage surfaced online showing Tupac in the studio doing vocal production for the project. A CD-quality version of “Too Tight” didn’t drop until 2016, and what’s wild is how perfectly Hammer mimics Pac’s husky, breathy flow.
Here’s another one for you: “Unconditional Love” was originally a reference track Tupac cut for Hammer’s Too Tight before it ended up on Pac’s own posthumous Greatest Hits in 1998.
Did you know MC Hammer and Tupac Shakur were friends? Did you know MC Hammer was once signed to Death Row Records? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
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Thomas Dishaw is the creator of Rap Therapy and a lifelong Hip Hop fan with deep roots in the culture. He previously worked at Heaven Studios, where he interviewed many of Detroit’s most influential voices.