- Position‹8 of 8
- Tupac Shakur is the best rapper
- Argument
Tupac created an incredible amount of material in his short career.
Tupac was tragically murdered in 1996, but he had already left his mark on the hip hop world by then. The quantity and quality of music that Tupac created in his 6 short years as a rapper is nothing less than extraordinary.
The argument
The case rests on output measured against the time available to produce it. Tupac died in 1996 at age 25, just 6 years after he began his rap career in 1989. Almost every other name raised in the argument about the greatest rapper had a longer run than that — time to develop, time to recover from a weak record, and time to accumulate a catalogue at an ordinary pace. Tupac had none of it. Within that incredibly small time frame he produced 11 albums and 2 live albums. The volume is the first half of the claim, and it is a claim about rate rather than total: a body of work of that size would be unremarkable spread across two decades and is extraordinary compressed into a handful of years, because it leaves no fallow period anywhere in the career. Whatever else was happening in his life across those years, the recording did not stop. The second half is that the speed did not come at the expense of the work. Even in his songs Tupac was extremely efficient without sacrificing quality: the track "Hail Mary" was recorded in just 30 minutes, with only a couple of takes. That detail matters because the standard objection to a rapid catalogue is that the quantity must have been bought with quality somewhere. Here the same efficiency that explains how much he made is offered as evidence about how he worked, rather than as a concession about what the work is worth. Judged on what he was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time — the size of the catalogue, the rate at which it was made, and the quality sustained at that rate — Tupac is the greatest rapper of all time.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Tupac was an incredible rapper, however, efficiency does not make him the best rapper of all time. Efficiency was Tupac's major flaw. Masterpieces take time to create, and unfortunately Tupac didn't create with patience. Had he slowed down and created less, his music most likely would have been the greatest of all time.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The counter rejects the criterion outright: volume relative to time in the industry is not what settles who is best, and on this reading the efficiency the premise celebrates was itself the weakness in the work. [Rejecting P2] The same facts are read against the conclusion — recording at that pace, including a track completed in a single half-hour session, is taken to show work made without the patience masterpieces require, with the counter arguing that a slower and smaller output would have stood higher.