No. 11: 2Pac

Even though 97 percent of readers probably just saw the number in the header and tuned me out forever, I'm going to explain this one...and I'm going to do a damn good job of it:

If Tupac Shakur wasn't dead, you wouldn't consider him a top-5 emcee of all time. Nor should you.

(That explanation was a little more simple than I thought it would be, actually.)

Look...unlike many of the younger hip-hop fans out there who just parrot the cliché bit about Biggie and 'Pac being the best ever, I was actually alive for and old enough to remember the entire 2Pac experience. And let me very clearly state what should be obvious but what is apparently uncool to say: We have most definitely let his tragic and premature death skew our view of how great he really was, even if it's not by much.

"How this motherfucker not have me number one?"

It's not a phenomenon that is exclusive to 'Pac — almost every celebrity that dies young gets deified, whether or not it's deserved. It happened to James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Kurt Cobain...the list goes on and on. And it happened with 2Pac and Biggie, too.

So let's try to place his truncated career in perspective as rationally as we can:

After getting one foot in the industry door as a roadie, backup dancer and later guest emcee with Digital Underground, 2Pac made his big double-barreled splash in 1992 with a starring role in the movie Juice and his first solo LP, 2Pacalypse Now. For that album and his second, 1993's Strictly 4 My N****Z, 'Pac's sound gravitates more toward the East Coast (he was born in New York and lived for a couple of years in Baltimore). With songs like "If My Homie Calls" and "I Get Around," these two albums often go underappreciated when discussing 2Pac's career. Strictly... may be his best all-around album.

With his third release, Me Against The World, 'Pac became a true chart-topping powerhouse. The record was released while he was in prison on a sexual assault conviction, and it exposed a personal side that listeners hadn't seen as much of on the first two records. The first single, "Dear Mama," remains one of his most acclaimed songs.

After being released from prison, 2Pac signed with Death Row Records, abandoning his East Coast roots completely and aligning himself squarely on the other side of a growing beef between Suge Knight and Puffy. All Eyez On Me, a double album, was another massive commercial success, but from a musical standpoint it paled in comparison to his first three records. In a way, 'Pac seemed content to settle into the Bishop character he played in Juice, becoming an almost cartoonish figure. That front he put up shielded his much more complex and thoughtful persona from public view.

Life wound up imitating art, and Bishop...errr...Shakur was shot and killed in September of 1996. Eight posthumous albums have followed — Tupac had been stockpiling material before his death in a rumored effort to get off of Death Row as soon as possible. It would be unfair to count those records as part of his catalog, however — many rappers leave dozens of songs on the cutting room floor (usually for good reason), and outtakes are precisely what these albums were made up of.

To be fair, we're only taking the first four 2Pac albums (and the Thug Life and Makaveli projects) into account when evaluating him. 2Pacalypse was a very solid but unspectacular album, Strictly and Me Against The World were very good to great, and All Eyez was a commercial smash but a disappointment musically. It's hard to say which direction Tupac Shakur's career would have gone in had he not died — but it was slowly trending downward when he met his end. There's no doubt that he had the ability to continue making great music again, but that wouldn't have been a guarantee, especially on a Death Row label that had Suge Knight calling the shots (and no longer had Dr. Dre).

He clearly made an impact on hip-hop, both for better and worse. While his cartoon'ish Bishop "thug" persona would spawn a generation of knock-off imitations that helped to kill real hip-hop (and, one might argue, do a major disservice to black culture in general), Tupac Shakur also proved that a hardcore hip-hop artist didn't have to build all of his songs around bravado. It was okay to let your emotions hang out there in your music without being branded as a pussy. Too few people have taken the cue on the latter count, but Shakur deserves credit for it nonetheless.

He did a lot in his short lifetime, and he has left arguably the biggest cultural imprint of any emcee ever. That isn't the same as being the best, though.