Dear Mama

Released as the lead single from 2Pac's third studio album Me Against the World (1995), this tribute to his mother Afeni Shakur became his first top ten on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number nine, and topped the Hot Rap Singles chart for five weeks. In 2009, the song became the first hip-hop recording by a soloist inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, who called it "a moving and eloquent homage to both the murdered rapper's own mother and all mothers struggling to maintain a family in the face of addiction, poverty and societal indifference."