News of September 28, 2006
"International" with Zola? A Rumor from Fall 2006
In fall 2006, "International" with Zola was considered a new 2Pac song. The track actually came out-just with entirely different guests than expected.
The report with which the site picked up a rumor from fan forums on September 28, 2006, was barely two sentences long. A song on the upcoming 2Pac album, said to feature a singer or rapper named Zola, was reportedly not titled “Pac’s Life” but “International.” Snoop Dogg was supposedly not featured, while Zola might even appear on two songs. The post explicitly labeled the note as a rumor.
New Tracklists Surfaced Almost Daily
The report came from a phase in which new details about the successor to Loyal to the Game (2004) surfaced almost daily. Preliminary tracklists alternately listed a song titled “Street Life” with Snoop Dogg and Zola, or other combinations. Reliable sources were rare; fan sites mostly quoted one another. The site adopted such lists as well, for instance in the post Tupac’s New Album Pac’s Life.
The Song Title Was Right, the Guests Were Not
A song titled “International” did indeed exist. When Pac’s Life was released on November 21, 2006, it appeared as track 7 on the album-though with Nipsey Hussle and Young Dre as guests, not Zola. Zola does not appear on the album’s final guest list at all. A song called “Street Life” is likewise nowhere to be found on the regular tracklist.
Snoop Dogg, on the other hand, was indeed on the album: on the remix of the title track “Pac’s Life,” he can be heard alongside T.I., Ashanti, and Chris Starr. The rumor was thus right about the song title and wrong about those involved.
The other rumors of those weeks were documented in the reports New Album Info and First Single from Pac’s Life. For Nipsey Hussle, the guest appearance was one of the early steps in a career that later made him a defining West Coast figure in his own right.