Grief and It's Portrayal in Hip-Hop

Grief is something I have always been particularly interested in, as evidenced by my thesis, so when searching for something to blog about and stumbling upon this quote from Lupe fiasco I knew I was hooked. ""It was a lot of tragedy coming into this album. In the midst of a lot of success, I was so busy I didn't have time to properly mourn. Talking to yourself, having some therapy with yourself – it was the hardest record to write because of the emotions.""-Lupe Fiasco.  This particular quotes references the struggle that Fiasco had when producing his second album  The Cool whilst going through a particularly difficult time in his life.  He had lost his father due to type II diabetes and his business partner got sentenced in 44 years in prison.

This got me thinking about grief portrayal within hip-hop.  I tried to think about songs where the artist is truly expressing feelings about losing a loved one and kept coming up short.  I thought this was interesting as so much of hip-hop tends to talk about violence, killing, gangs, drugs, etc. and a lot of these these things can often be presented and associated with death.  So I thought it was odd that I could think of only one song that explicitly talked about the grief that surrounds the death of a loved one in the hip-hop genre.  A quick Google search proved to me that I was wrong.  There were, in fact, several hip-hop songs in which grief was expressed.  The most popular include but are not limited to: Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Miss U by The Notorious B.I.G. feat 112, Life Goes On by 2pac, I'll Be Missin You by Puff Daddy feat. Faith Evans and 112 etc.  The list continues.  I think that these songs are particularly important to the hip-hop genre because they deal with a very real issue that almost all of us will face at one point in our lives or another even though grief is often something that is swept under the rug in our society.  Furthermore, with the amount of violence on the rise in our society and all the school shootings and deaths due to gun violence, I think it is interesting and useful for people to speak about not only the events but also the aftermath of such tragic events.  

The song that I am most familiar with that surrounds grief is the song Fighters by Lupe Fiasco, which can be accessed by clicking on the following link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrOoX6xGntc Fighters serves as the musical outro for the album the cool.  The song discusses grief in a very interesting way as Fiasco references that all of his supporters and people that love him have been buried underground.  He also references nobody being able to save him anymore now that he is alone.  my favorite verse of his is verse two of the song and is the following:

Man, I really miss my pops
Hope that God watches over him and that he's on top
That there is no more disease and that he's alright
That he's one of the generals inside the army of the light
And grandma, you know I had to bite something from you
So after every show it's "peace, and much love to you"
Auntie Tweetie's on the way, please look out for that girl
I know we'll meet again, so it's never me against the world

Here Lupe speaks about losing two of the most important people in his life and also alludes to grieving for someone that he is in the process of losing.  He also references the idea of Heaven and uses religion seemingly as a coping mechanism which mirrors the way a fair amount of people deal with grief in our society.  This is just one song that addresses so little of what a person can actually be experiencing but I think it discusses a way more important issue that a lot of hip-hop today which aims to "fuck bitches and get money." I would love it if more songs addressed the issues that nobody wants to talk about.  What do you guys think?  Do you know of any songs in hip-hop that address grief or other difficult but important issues?