The songs on “It’s That Easy” run the usual three to
five minutes, but they feel much longer. Working with
10-plus musicians — including longtime collaborators
Special Sauce and the All Fellas Band, as well as New
Orleans icon-cum-saint Dr. John — G-Love creates a
loose, bouncing improv sound — too mellow to be rock
and too hyped to be soul, though it has the spirits of
both running in its veins. “It’s That Easy” is a summer
kind of record (good for surviving East Coast winters)
that mixes rap, folk-rock and jazz.

There’s always a new element coming out of nowhere
— an acoustic guitar strum, an a cappella harmony, a
hip-hop scratch, a harmonica solo — to fill in when the
melody thins out. It’s an uncomplicated vibe with an
incredibly complex background. Mostly, G-Love deals
lyrically in the pleasures and disappointments found in
everyday things like romance and basketball and
friendship, but he couches it in sophisticated,
high-octane arrangements that sound beautifully simple
in the way that only intensely intricate things can.

The album’s best is “Lay Down the Law,” a bittersweet
ode to a junkie friend who’s simultaneously the object
of worship and pity. Jazzy-soul guitar is fused with a
laid-back high-hat/snare beat and joined with tenderly
harmonized vocals. The effect simultaneously twists a
knife in the heart and warms the ears from the inside,
evoking the painful nostalgia of lost friendship in the
same masterful way that Sade’s “Maureen” and Pete
Rock & C.L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You”
did.

Though G-Love tends to favor a good-time atmosphere
in his playing, his lyrics often fall on subjects of
sadness: murder (“Slipped Away”), the fucked-up world
(“200 Years”) and race relations (“Yeah, It’s That
Easy”). On the latter subject, G-Love lays out his
personal political analysis: “You and me used to run ball
in the league/We ran the championship team/The best
they had seen … Now that we’ve grown/We’ve been in
different scenes/And in fact we sold out to the social
contract/Meaning we don’t hang.” The integration
G-Love experienced as a white youth in Philadelphia
turned into segregation as he grew up, but he was left
with an understanding of the grays between blackness
and whiteness, as well as a deep identification with
black music. To some people, the raps and jams on
“It’s That Easy” will sound like minstrelsy. But what it
is really is the sound of memories from that short-lived
period of ’70s urban integration, which makes G-Love a
lot more like Tower of Power than like Vanilla Ice.
G-Love probably won’t find many people who would
agree that racial harmony is “that easy,” but his
hot-buttered jams sure make it sound easier than it
seems.

“Gang Related” prompts the sad conclusion that Shakur spent his last months filming a movie that’s best described as not too bad. Much of the time, though, it’s pretty terrible. Shakur and his costar James Belushi muddle through a convoluted, incomplete story about corrupt cops who get in a pickle when one of the many drug dealers they’ve ripped off and then murdered turns out to be an undercover DEA agent. Screenwriter and director Jim Kouf can’t decide until the last 20 minutes whether the film should be a slapstick Keystone Kops affair or a brutal “Bad Lieutenant” one, and never bothers to explain how Belushi and Shakur — who think they’re just doing society a favor while conveniently lining their own pockets — got to the point where they feel that premeditated homicide equals public service.

Clearly the actors weren’t given much to work with, but neither does much to help the situation. Like Kouf, they imagine no background, no history and no motivations for their characters. Belushi blusters and hectors as Divinci, a salt-of-the-earth police veteran just trying to retire to Hawaii, and Shakur, as his partner Rodriguez, is often simply blank as a young officer with a crushing gambling debt. Shakur doesn’t connect with his character deeply enough to be convincing, a defect in almost all of his roles.

Yet, Shakur’s performances are still striking because his powerful charisma fills in the gaps. He doesn’t so much inhabit a role as cover it with his vitality and poise. Presence was something Tupac conveyed in his rapping as well — he brought the same depth of passion and emotion to the screen and the recording studio. It’s that presence that has made every single one of Shakur’s film appearances exciting, if not brilliant. It’s a magic that’s hard to describe and impossible to pin down. Clichis spring irresistibly to mind — he was “loved by the camera,” or he “set off sparks” when he appeared on-screen. His presence felt like a sun or a star, drawing in everything around it with a massive gravity, emanating light and heat.

That presence, while innate, was far from unthinking. Shakur, with his teenage training at the elite Baltimore High School of the Performing Arts, knew exactly what he was doing. He knew how to summon an air of intensity, or humor, or pain and how to deploy it to dazzling effect. But the roles he got were thin, and whatever distractions were tugging at him during his last years kept him from taking that spark and plugging it into a three-dimensional character whose soul could be glimpsed between his lines.

The closest Shakur got was Spoon, a musician hooked on heroin and struggling to get clean in Vondie Curtis Hall’s “Gridlock’d.” Spoon — smart, sweet, funny and loyal — resembles a streetwise mother hen trying to keep everyone and everything around him together. When he decides to kick after his girlfriend lands in the hospital with an overdose, he’s determined to bring his less-than-enthusiastic buddy Stretch (Tim Roth) with him. With Spoon, you can sense a past, a history that’s brought him to this point. This is thanks, in part, to Hall’s nuanced script, but also to Shakur’s efforts to get inside Spoon’s head and map the nooks and crannies of his psyche.

Several years earlier, Shakur also created a breakthrough role in Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice.” Playing Bishop, a teenager who turns to crime as a way to control his life and winds up losing his mind instead, Shakur captures the confusion and conflicts of adolescence, then turns up the heat as Bishop loses his grip on reality. Bishop shares some qualities with the personas that Shakur created in his music — rage against a world where the scales are tipped against him, defiance, determination to succeed against the odds — and Shakur digs deep into Bishop to make vivid the point where his sanity breaks. But Bishop also suffers from the lack of background that plagues most of Shakur’s roles. As critic Armond White writes in his forthcoming “Rebel for the Hell of It: The Life of Tupac Shakur,” “talent and force isn’t a justification for ignoring how Bishop’s anger just pops out of nowhere. Bishop’s behavior is cut off from reason, suggesting a desperate freedom to young viewers.”

The cold reality is that the cumulative screen time Shakur racked up in the six movies he made since 1990 (a rather impressive achievement in and of itself, considering the simultaneous demands of his recording career) doesn’t give us enough to judge whether or not he was “the tan DeNiro,” as critic Nelson George once speculated. “Poetic Justice,” “Juice,” “Above the Rim,” “Bullet,” “Gridlock’d” and “Gang Related” offer only glimpses of a talent yet to be fully tapped. What moviegoers lost with Shakur’s death was the chance to see what kind of actor he would have been, to see his charisma blossom into something greater and deeper.

We’re left instead with the macabre opportunity to deconstruct Shakur’s films in the light of his death. And there’s plenty to work with. Violence and guns surrounded him on celluloid. In four out of his six roles he was cast as a criminal; in the other two he portrayed men trying to escape the criminal life. He shot and was shot at often, and now those shots echo the gunfire that killed him. There are other ironies — less cerebral ones. The soundtrack of “Gang Related,” which features four of Shakur’s previously unreleased songs, is being released by Death Row records. Shakur’s mother, Afeni, is currently suing Death Row for royalties she says are owed to her son’s estate, and Death Row’s CEO, Suge Knight, now in prison, is rumored to have had a hand in Shakur’s death.

The impulse to idealize Shakur will undoubtedly seek to paint him as a genius, as both a musician and an actor. It’s almost as if the public needs him to have been one in order to make his death matter, or at least matter enough. One more dead, famous, young black man just looks too regular. But his movies will stand beside his records, and together his works will tell the whole story, of talent, yes, but of negligence and confusion and pain, as well.

As he’s known to be, Coolio’s generous with “My Soul’s” sample helpings, which for the most part he rerecords with live musicians. He lifts a big chunk of the BarKay’s “She Talks to Me With Her Body” for
the bouncy “One Mo’,” uses Grace Jones’ “Slave to the Rhythm” to spice up “Ooh La La” and even turns to Glen Frye’s “Smuggler’s Blues” for a backdrop to the philosophical narrative of “Nature of the Business.” Coolio’s often criticized for the extent to which he uses other people’s work in his songs. But it’s a matter of quality, not quantity, and Coolio has an ear for using just the right musical spark, jamming with samples as if they were other instruments, but never letting himself be carried by them.

In other words, Coolio’s a song crafter extraordinaire. His flair for turning a hook into a musical noose that ropes you in and keeps you humming way after the music’s over puts him on the same shelf as maestros like Burt Bacharach, and Gamble and Huff. The only difference is that, like hip-hop’s Carole King, Coolio has decided to keep his goodies for himself.

Coming of age as he did in the ’70s, Coolio’s greatest respect is for complex rapping. His guests on “My Soul” — the 40 Thevz, Ras Kass, Malika — all turn in performances that defy the laws of physics (see especially “Hit ‘Em” and “Can I Get Down One Time”). Coolio himself seems always to be trying to see how many words he can fit in a line or on a beat, lyrically bouncing between comedy (“Ooh La La,” “2 Minutes and 21 Seconds of Funk”) and tragedy (“Knight Fall,” “Nature of the Business”).

That difference between seriousness and fun is another dichotomy Coolio has worked since his entrance into the spotlight. His now-ubiquitous persona in the media is multilayered, much more so than rappers are usually granted. “Fantastic Voyage” showed him as a carefree regular Joe who dreams of being the master of ceremonies at the ultimate beach party, while in “Gangsta’s Paradise” he played the wearily wise hood. In the “My Soul” videos, he’s both the bumbling casanova (“Ooh La La”) and the righteous pundit (“C U When U Get There”). If “My Soul” is Coolio’s party, then he’s both the youngster hitting the punch and getting wild on the dance floor, and one of the older folks going a little slower, watching from the sides in his wisdom, and coming in on the older numbers.