Tupac Shakur has become another hip-hop artist to overtake a record set by The Beatles as his 1998 posthumous compilation album, Greatest Hits, overtook their LP Abbey Road as one of Billboard’s longest-charting albums of all time.
Early last year, Canadian emcee Drake surpassed the British band as the act with the most top-five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 ever, and now 2pac has followed suit by outperforming the group in terms of chart dominance by one week.
On September 12th, Billboard released some new statistics, which saw the 1998 project Greatest Hits placed above Abbey Road for amassing a total of 491 weeks in the Billboard 200, while The Beatles’ 1969 body of work sits at 490.
This record comes 27 years after Shakur’s 1996 murder in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas and sees the late artist’s music competing with other hip-hop heavyweights such as Kendrick Lamar, whose Good Kid m.A.A.d City album has 567 weeks to its name and Eminem whose 2005 project Curtain Call has an epic 648 weeks.
Although Greatest Hits has never sat atop the chart, it has previously peaked within the top three and has re-entered the charts multiple times since the lyriccit’s demise, including when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
Although he ranks above 2pac concerning total weeks accrued on the charts, Kendrick Lamar has continued to pay tribute to his late West Coast counterpart and recently took to his Instagram account to share a photo and video dump of his recent trip to Japan.
In one of the photos, Lamar can be seen rocking a vintage ‘Pac shirt featuring the late rap icon holding both of his middle fingers up, which was taken from an iconic 1994 photo shoot by the photographer Mike Miller.
Posted to Instagram on the 27th anniversary of Shakur’s death, the photo was Lamar’s way of paying tribute to the legend who came before him.