RZA decides who was more dangerous: Biggie Smalls or 2Pac
The conversation of the greatest rapper of all time, more often than not, comes down to two names: Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. The pair sit side by side on hip-hop’s pantheon of greats. Both were killed within six months of each other in late 1996 and early 1997, but their legacies have lived on since.
It’s a discussion that everyone, from fans to peers, has weighed in on, and even the normally silent RZA lent his voice to the debate. The Wu-Tang Clan rapper spoke to Lex Fridman in 2021, where he spoke about the two legendary figures and gave his thoughts on what made them special, as well as their impact on hip-hop. He praised Tupac for how he connected with his listeners but managed to avoid giving an outright answer about who he thought was a better artist.
“Pac, once again, immaculate voice,” RZA said. “But what Pac had, I think, was a way of touching us in all of our emotions. Like, Pac had the power to infuse your emotional thoughts, like ‘Brenda Has a Baby’, ‘Dear Mama’, but then he had the power to arouse the rebel in you. You know?”
The rapper continued: “And those two things – actually, he was probably more dangerous than Big. Like Notorious B.I.G, we could party with him, where Pac was more going into the Malcolm X of things, and society fears that.”
The Californian is often said to have been a voice of a generation, and if not for his life being cut tragically short, it would have furthered his life of social activism and become an even greater cultural phenomenon. RZA touches on that by equating his path with the likes of Malcolm X. Pac broke the mould by blending poetic lyricism with powerful storytelling to create a platform to address those social issues.
RZA, who knew and had worked with the Notorious B.I.G, went on to give the East Coast rapper his proper due while highlighting Pac’s ability to incite a reaction from listeners, adding that “Big communicated love, but he wasn’t starting revolutions.”
“But just as a fellow artist, I think not only was Big a dope lyricist, I think he had a voice that was really immaculate—in a sense that some rappers get on top of the music, and you’ve got to get used to them or you got to vibe with them, but he made a record that sounds like a record immediately. If you go back and listen to his music, you can take his voice and put it on anything, and for some reason, it sounds like a record.”
It shows that despite almost three decades since their respective deaths, their legacy only strengthens with age, and the back-and-forth discussion over their merits is neverending and still special to this day. Whether you agree with RZA or not, trying to find a solution to the perpetual debate of who the greater artist is will only lead to more debates. Yet, at the same time, it is those debates and comparisons that keep their individual and collective legacies alive.