Two months after Tupac was shot and killed in the passenger seat of a car driven by his friend and business partner Suge Knight, his estate posthumously put out his fifth studio album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996). Released under his alias Makaveli, Pac’s LP took on a menacing, vengeful tone, as he looked to strike fear into adversaries like East Coast MCs Nas and Jay-Z.
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Additionally, The Don Killuminati presented many religious themes, most notably the depiction of Pac crucified like Jesus Christ on the album cover. Overall, it felt like the rapper saw himself as ostracized and vilified by the media and his contemporaries, and he was using this project to air out those grievances.
For the second song “Hail Mary,” which featured Pac’s complimentary California rap group Outlawz, Pac drew a line in the sand, essentially telling his peers to pick a side. With his dauntingly sung Come with me / Hail Mary, n***a, run quick, see hook, Pac made sure everyone knew he was not to be messed with.
I ain’t a killer, but don’t push me
Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to gettin’ pussy
Picture paragraphs unloaded, wise words bein’ quoted
Peeped the weakness in the rap game and sewed it
What accentuated the ominous atmosphere of “Hail Mary” was the powerful instrumental crafted by Hurt-M-Badd, who produced many of the other The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory songs. When speaking about the track in an interview with XXL in 2006, Hurt-M-Badd noted that there was hesitation in the creation of “Hail Mary,” as the beat and raps both came together swiftly.
“’Hail Mary” actually only took me 15, 20 minutes to create the whole beat,” he said “I just came to work one day, I was feeling good. I was sitting behind the boards. I just touched a few sounds man, and it was like done. And so an engineer came into the room where I worked, and he heard the track–I told him to put the headphones on. He looked at me like, ‘Damn, Hurt! This sounds like a hip-hop funeral, man.’ When I do stuff, I don’t be feeling it like everybody else, I guess ‘cause it’s me. He said, ‘Why don’t you let Tupac hear this?’ When Tupac heard it, he really didn’t say nothing but ‘Gimme that.'”
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By the next day, Pac had finished his entire portion of the track.
“I left the studio [after making the beat] and when I came back the next day, everybody from the security guard to the phone lady to the engineer–everybody ran up to me like, ‘Wait ‘till you hear what this man done laid down over your track,'” Hurt-M-Badd told XXL. “When I heard it, I didn’t think it was a hit. I was like, ‘Why is Tupac laying this stuff down over my track?’ We all had a listening party for the album, and ‘Pac was loving every song but when they played that song, he just went through a thing. He threw his hand up in the air with his Hennessy bottle. He threw his hand up in the air like he ruled a nation.”
Pac’s intuition about the song would end up coming true, as it became one of the most beloved hits in his entire catalog. In fact, when Dr. Dre and the surviving members of N.W.A put together their 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, they included a scene depicting Pac recording “Hail Mary.” And, while the depiction is not entirely historically accurate, it certainly speaks to the importance of the song in Pac’s career.
“Hail Mary” would also be included in the 1998 release of Pac’s first Greatest Hits album.
(Photo by Gramercy Pictures/Getty Images)
