UNTIL THE END OF TIME is 2 hours and 4 minutes long. Nevertheless, the remix of the title track is the most successful song on PAC’S LIFE Snoop Dogg’s verse may be the distinguishing factor against the original cut, although both have a catchy chorus from Ashanti. Tupac’s delivery doesn’t really match the commercial hip hop sound of 2006, and the record is his most repetitive, with a few tracks rehashed or remixed to pad out the run time and track list. PAC’S LIFE is “only” a single album, although it still runs 55 minutes over 13 tracks, and its length is felt. Tupac was a prolific artist, however, and so his posthumous records aren’t as glaringly lean as they could have been. I’m not a precious “honor the dead” person, but once you’re exhuming an artist’s work to propagate a “brand” rather than share one or two final historical works directly created by said artist, you’re not really honoring the person anyway. The final Tupac album, released to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death, fittingly represents the nadir of the necromancy that revived him time and time again.
However, I guess some mention can be made that Tupac was more present across “his” seven posthumous albums than Biggie was on “his” three…although that can’t be attributed to either one of them. That transformation yielded the foremost West Coast icon of the Golden Age of Hip Hop, which while it’s mentioned, I do prefer the East Coast flavor of the era (and by extension, Tupac’s foremost rival, The Notorious B.I.G.). I will say I won’t be including BEGINNINGS: THE LOST TAPES 1988–1991 (2007), although that’s a worthwhile curio to see the earliest expression of Tupac Shakur, which morphed into something quite different by the time of his second or third album. So with this piece, I’ll be ranking the 11 “canon” Tupac albums, even if the vast majority of them were not made with his direct involvement. Tupac put out only four albums during his lifetime under his own name, not including the first and only release from Thug Life, the group he co-founded, THUG LIFE VOL. 2 (2005), on which other artists speak, interpret, and perform Tupac’s poetry. That’s not counting the numerous greatest hits and remix compilations and records like THE ROSE THAT GREW FROM CONCRETE (2000) and THE ROSE, VOL. After being killed at the age of 25, Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur kept the money rolling with seven posthumous “studio albums” of relatively original and/or unreleased content. Well, I guess it can’t really be blamed on Tupac himself. The man put out so many lengthy and/or double albums, which at some point just constitutes a lot of filler. Look, I’ll be honest right off the bat: it was a slog getting through the 2Pac discography (2Pac being the stage name of course, but I’ll be using “Tupac” to name Shakur from now on).
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