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Rapper tops overrated list
04/09/2008 13:47 - (SA)
Dean Goodman
Los Angeles - Dead rapper Tupac Shakur, the hip-hop icon who sold more records after he was murdered than during his brief career, is the most overrated person in music, according to music magazine Blender.
Shakur tops a tongue-in-cheek list that also includes "places, trends and other junk in rock", Blender said in its forthcoming October issue, due on newsstands next week.
Other overrated finalists included the Grammys at No 7, encores at No 12, Pink Floyd at No 14 and "the music you loved as a teenager" at No 23.
Shakur, a "gangsta" rapper who showed his sensitive side in movies, was killed during an unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996. More than a dozen albums have been released in the ensuing years, and his image is almost as ubiquitous as that of Che Guevara or Bob Marley.
Not the first time
But while Shakur was a decent rapper with "insane rock-star charisma", according to Blender, he also "larded records with self-mythologizing, mediocre filler".
It's not the first time the pages of Blender have been used to bring down Shakur a few notches. In its June issue, rapper Lil Wayne listed him among his top five rappers, but then admitted: "I can't front: I was never into Pac."
As for the Grammys, the music industry's top awards, Blender said sitting through the ceremony was "like watching paint dry on Celine Dion's forehead".
And encores were notable chiefly for allowing bands to go backstage and do drugs while fans wonder if they should beat the rush to the parking lot, Blender said.
Veteran British rock band Pink Floyd, meanwhile, were responsible for "unbearable LSD slapstick" and "self-important bombast". And Blender warned that teenagers' brains "can inflate a great band to Christ-size proportions" and turn a bad song into a meaningful one.
- Reuters
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South Africa
