Pickaxe and shovel in hand, Afeni Shakur and Suge Knight went digging in the lost vaults of Tupac Shakur. There's plenty of motive to go around for such sweat and toil - he is still Death Row's biggest star even post-humously, and she wants to keep her son's name and memory alive in the public eye. Statistically though the law of diminishing returns is creeping ever higher – the more nuggets that they mine, the less that are left to find amidst the dust and rubble. When the rumors of this album first surfaced, the question on everyone's minds was whether they had actually hit a motherlode or were just trying to pass off cubic zirconium and pyrite as diamonds and gold. Now that the new double album has been released to the public, we finally know the truth.

This post-humous double-album has enough quality material to justify going gold or platinum though, and not just on the strength of Tupac's name. It's the first post-humous album since "R U Still Down?" that really does him justice. There may not be much left to mine for future Tupac releases (and we all know they'll come anyway) but what shows up here still makes it worth your while to cop, even if it's the first Tupac Shakur album that you buy. It stands up to anything already released in 2001 – an impressive feat for a rapper that was long since dead in the ground if not in the minds of hip-hop fans worldwide.