Tupac Shakur

Gangsta rap is one of the most divisive genres of music out there. There's not a great deal of grey area in it; people tend to either love it or hate it.

I for one, love it. As previously stated this is mandatory seeing as I'm a suburban white boy but I genuinely think there is a great deal of artistic merit in rap.

Going back to NWA in the late 1980s, rap music had the ability to genuinely scare people and even, if it tried hard enough, effect some kind of social change.

Not that NWA effected social change really, they mostly just rapped about shooting the police. But the visceral thrill of the music remains to this day; most 1970s and 80s party rap has dated badly, but gangsta is truly timeless.

However, no rapper summed up everything good and bad about gangsta rap like Tupac Shakur.

Tupac was a writhing, tattooed contradiction of a man.

He was socially conscious and pro-woman, while indulging in thug life and misogyny.

He was repulsive, yet intelligent and quite brilliant.

He made some of rap's greatest ever music... and after he died people have been pumping out some of its worst with his name stapled to it.

Newcomers to rap often only remember Tupac for the East Coast/West Coast rivalry, but there was far more to him than that.

His first album 2Pacalypse now was a brutal, underground hip-hop record shot through with a political consciousness. Its biggest hit was the teenage-pregnancy lament 'Brenda's Got A Baby,' and that didn't even have a chorus.

He also, of course, made one of rap's singular greatest albums (and its first double) with 1996's All Eyez On Me. Considering he'd been in prison most of the previous year, releasing one of rap's greatest records (as well as another studio album the same year) is pretty impressive.

And Tupac was prolific. As well as creating possibly party-rap's greatest song, 'California Love', that same year, he apparently left some 200 unreleased songs at his death.

Some of those that have been released since have been truly revelatory - 'Changes' is a beautiful piece of work, and 'Ghetto Gospel' was actually pretty good too.

While I think that strictly speaking, The Notorious B.I.G. was the better and moer original rapper, Tupac was clearly the better person, more socially conscious and by far more varied.

I mean, All Eyez On Me, one of rap's high-water marks, was just an album he tossed off to make Death Row Records happy.

Tupac was truly a unique talent, and one of rap's best ever.

But was he THE best ever...?

Photos from flickr.com by jlmaral