Ooh, boy. The mailbag people at Blender are gonna be extra busy once this hits the newsstands:
He had insane rock-star charisma. He admirably conceived of a gangsta rapper as a principled rebel. His booming baritone gave basslines competition for the most-trunk-rattling part of a hip-hop song. Hell, even Juice hasn’t aged nearly as badly as you’d expect. But while Tupac’s musical highs were epic—the pro-feminist “Keep Ya Head Up,” the terrifying “Hail Mary,” the boisterous “California Love”—that still leaves 15,837 other songs. He was a good rapper, not a great one: The guy larded records with self-mythologizing, mediocre filler that wouldn’t have made Biggie’s “give to Lil’ Cease” file. Maybe someone in his retinue could’ve stepped in during one of those legendary 96-hour recording binges and said, “Pac, instead of laying down this 14-minute rant about how Sun Tzu taught you how to take down the East Coast, how about some Yahtzee?” The man: awesome. The music: somewhat less than awesome.
See the entire list here.
