Outlawz

West Coast rappers Outlawz gained their chief visibility through a longstanding tie to 2Pac. Their initial exposure to a wider audience arrived via several guest spots on the Makaveli album. Co-billing on the 1999 posthumous 2Pac release Still I Rise brought additional attention and briefly extended that connection. Only in late 2000 did the group secure clearance for their own debut, Ride wit Us or Collide wit Us, issued on Outlaw Recordz through Koch distribution. The artwork foregrounded 2Pac’s likeness and the project leaned heavily on repeated allusions to the late icon, capitalizing on Outlawz’s image as his presumed protégés.

Neither that album nor the follow-up Novakane, which surfaced a year later on the same label, achieved notable commercial traction. Outlawz preserved 2Pac’s signature West Coast thug/gangsta approach yet remained limited as lyricists, repeatedly invoking their former affiliation while settling into stock thug imagery. They also lacked partnerships with leading West Coast producers and maintained no formal ties to Snoop Dogg’s Dogghouse circle or the Bay Area contingent built around E-40 and Spice 1. In 2006 Young Noble joined Layzie Bone for the Real Talk release Thug Brothers; the same imprint later that year issued the Outlawz project Against All Oddz.