The 1990s File Feature
How Do U Want It/California Love
How Do U Want It / California Love: 2Pac at the Summit The Summer of 1996 There are certain songs that feel less like recordings and more like weather system…
01 The Story
How Do U Want It / California Love: 2Pac at the Summit
The Summer of 1996
There are certain songs that feel less like recordings and more like weather systems: they arrive and everything else is temporarily displaced. In the summer of 1996, that force of nature was the double A-side pairing of How Do U Want It and California Love by 2Pac, featuring K-Ci and JoJo. This was Tupac Shakur at the absolute apex of his commercial power, riding the momentum of his All Eyez on Me album, which had dropped in February of that year and immediately announced itself as one of the most fully realized artistic statements in rap history up to that point.
The Making of an Anthem
California Love had already established itself earlier in 1996 as a statement of West Coast authority, built around a Roger Troutman vocoder performance that gave it an instantly recognizable sonic fingerprint. Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman produced "California Love", and the combination of Dre's architecture and Troutman's talkbox created something that felt both futuristic and rooted in a deep funk tradition. How Do U Want It, meanwhile, leaned into a different register: more sensual, more direct, with K-Ci and JoJo providing a smooth R&B counterweight to Tupac's aggressive charisma. Together, the two tracks created a single that could work in almost any context, club or car, radio or bedroom.
The Chart Ascent
The Billboard numbers for this release are staggering even by the standards of peak-era mainstream rap. The single debuted on June 15, 1996, at position 64 on the Hot 100, then made one of the most dramatic single-week leaps in chart history, jumping to number 6 the following week. From there it continued its climb: 4, then 3, and then number 1 on the chart dated July 13, 1996. It stayed on the Hot 100 for 24 weeks total, a run that speaks to the record's genuine saturation of the culture that summer. Whether you were listening to rap stations, pop radio, or watching MTV, there was no avoiding it.
Tupac's Commercial Peak
The achievement here needs to be understood in the context of where rap stood commercially in 1996. The East Coast-West Coast tension that had been building for years had become genuinely dangerous, but it had also supercharged the commercial stakes. All Eyez on Me had sold two million copies in its first week, and the singles campaign that followed kept Tupac's name in every conversation about popular music. The double A-side reached number 1 on the Hot 100 during a period when chart-topping rap was still rare enough to feel like a statement, and it announced the Death Row Records roster's commercial dominance in terms that were impossible to argue with.
Legacy: The Weight of What Followed
Tupac Shakur was shot and killed on September 13, 1996, just two months after this single was at the top of the charts. That biographical fact permanently alters how the summer of 1996 sounds in retrospect. How Do U Want It / California Love now carries the weight of being the sound of a peak that was also almost the end, a document of an artist operating at maximum power in the last season of his life. The music itself, vibrant and assured and gloriously alive, pushes back against that reading every time you listen. The 8.9 million YouTube views the recording continues to attract reflect an audience that keeps returning, kept honest by the music's refusal to feel like an artifact.
Turn it up and let the summer of 1996 reclaim its territory.
"How Do U Want It/California Love" - 2Pac Featuring K-Ci And JoJo's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
How Do U Want It / California Love: Power, Place, and the Language of Summer
Two Texts, Two Emotional Registers
What makes this double A-side remarkable as a lyrical document is how completely the two tracks differ in their concerns while sharing the same underlying assertion: Tupac Shakur knows exactly where he is and exactly who he is, and he wants you to understand both. California Love is about geography as identity, about the specific pride and pleasure of belonging to a place, the West Coast elevated to mythology. How Do U Want It is more intimate, more direct about physical desire, with K-Ci and JoJo providing a melodic frame that softens the edges without blunting the directness.
California as a State of Mind
The California that Tupac describes is not a travel brochure destination. It is a felt reality: the warmth, the specific social texture of the West Coast, the pride of a hip-hop culture that had spent years being told it was secondary to New York. California Love functions as a declaration of regional sovereignty, using funk tradition and vocoder wizardry to build something that felt simultaneously like a party and a manifesto. The song names cities, describes rituals, evokes the particular pleasure of summer in a state where summer is both season and philosophy. The geography becomes metaphor for an entire way of being.
Desire and Directness
In How Do U Want It, Tupac's lyricism operates in a different mode: frank about desire, unapologetic in its directness, using R&B conventions to frame what is essentially a conversation about appetite. K-Ci and JoJo's contributions are crucial here; their smooth delivery creates a context in which Tupac's more aggressive energy reads as seductive rather than combative. The interplay between rap and R&B was central to mid-nineties mainstream hip-hop, and this track demonstrated how naturally the two idioms could coexist when the creative chemistry was right. The track asked its audience to engage with desire as something uncomplicated and honest rather than something to be dressed up in metaphor.
The Political Undercurrent
Even in its most celebratory moments, Tupac's work in 1996 carried awareness of the precariousness of Black life in America. The confident pleasure of California Love exists alongside an implicit understanding of what it costs to claim that kind of joy in a culture that has historically worked to deny it. The swagger in the music is earned, not assumed, and that distinction matters. Listeners responded not just to the beat but to the emotional authenticity underneath it: a young Black man from the West Coast asserting his right to celebration, to desire, to pride in his place and his community.
Why These Songs Endure
The double A-side has outlasted its era because it captured something that transcends its specific biographical and cultural moment. The joy of belonging to a place, the pleasure of direct desire, the particular electricity of summer at its peak: these are experiences that every generation rediscovers. The Roger Troutman talkbox hook from "California Love" remains one of the most recognizable sounds in popular music, and that instant recognizability keeps drawing new listeners in. What they find, beneath the nostalgia and the mythology, is music that was already about something real.
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