Credit: Alex Const

The stories of Eminem and Tupac are based on tales of survival in their respective communities. While Tupac eventually met his untimely end in the mid-1990s, seeing Eminem become the reigning king of hip-hop directly afterwards broke down the door for a white kid actually becoming a decent MC in an era when the hottest white rapper was being looked at as Kid Rock and Fred Durst. 50 Cent ultimately got his start through Em, but he thought that there was a fundamental difference in what made people flock to ‘Slim Shady’ rather than Pac.

When you look at their origin stories, Em and Pac both had to endure some of the biggest hardships anyone had ever experienced. They both struggled through hard times, and even though Eminem wasn’t nearly as gangster as Tupac claimed to be, he wasn’t afraid to call himself one of the biggest names in hip-hop when he broke out of Detroit.

That’s before you get into unpacking his songs, though. Despite being electric whenever he had a mic in his hand, Eminem’s ‘Slim Shady’ persona was something ripped directly out of a demented South Park episode half the time. Most of his situations revolved around everyone turning against him, his strained relationships with his ex-girlfriend Kim and his mother, and occasionally killing people just for funsies.

But Tupac had a far more complex lineage. After moving to California, he represented everything that California hip-hop was supposed to be, down to him getting one of the best beats that Dr Dre had ever been involved with on ‘California Love’. And even when he talked about the hardships that came with being from the streets, he never attacked people because he felt like it. He knew times were tough, but half the reason why his tone worked on ‘Changes’ and ‘Dear Mama’ was because he always knew how to keep his head up when things looked bleak.

50 Cent might have had a similar upbringing in New York, but he always respected the fact that Tupac could remain optimistic compared to Em’s expectations for things going right, saying, “The expectations of things going right from a white American perspective versus accepting the idea of things not going right from an African American perspective are what make the difference in the tones of those records.”

It’s not like Eminem couldn’t get a little bit whiny on his hits, either. Whereas tracks like ‘Kim’ and ‘Stan’ were genuinely disturbing looks into the mind of a dysfunctional rapper, hearing something like ‘Superman’, where he spends the better part of five minutes just clowning on his ex, feels more like a high school bully that would shove the nearest person into the locker instead of someone who wants to kill you.

In fact, some of Em’s best tracks come from when he’s taking that kind of optimism Pac talked about and infusing it into his own music. For as dated as a song like ‘Not Afraid’ might be today, it’s still one of the better pop rap hits that he’s ever made, and other tunes like ‘Lose Yourself’ and ‘Beautiful’ are subtle reminders that just because the whole world seems dark doesn’t mean that the light has gone out.

That’s why when they go through the most respected rappers of all time, 2Pac is always going to be near the top of anyone’s list. Anyone can write about things going wrong in their lives, but it takes a special kind of heart to acknowledge that times are tough and reassure themselves that they’ll be okay.