Hip Hop is a deadly business. In the last five years, rap fans have mourned the untimely deaths of Nipsey Hussle, Pop Smoke, TakeOff, Young Dolph, King Von, PnB Rock, Julio Foolio and countless other artists, with gunfire sadly often to blame. Given the stark increase in deaths among young rappers, the prevalence of the posthumous Hip Hop album has increased immeasurably — helped by the fact that many of today’s rappers record at a pace that would make even The Beatles in 1963 blush.
All of this has led to a natural endpoint of labels and estates refusing to let hard drives gather dust in the mythical music vault. After all, the posthumous album is big business. Releases from XXXTENTACION, Juice WRLD and the aforementioned Pop Smoke have been some of the most successful in recent years, and if there is money to be made out of an artist (dead or alive), then you can be sure that the major label system will squeeze out every cent they can.
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Ever since posthumous albums first became prevalent in the mid ’90s, a central question at the heart of the issue has arose. How can an album be completed and released without the artist behind it? Classics such as The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory and Life After Death were already completed by the time 2Pac and Biggie were gunned down in their prime, but in the decades since, every scrap of material the rap legends ever recorded has been exploited for commercial gain. Of course, this is not just a Hip Hop problem; David Bowie and Prince have seen their vaults raided in the years after their deaths.
As Grade A Productions and Interscope Records gear up to release the third posthumous Juice WRLD album in four years, the question of posthumous albums is once again at the forefront of the conversation. What value do they have? Do they shamelessly cater to rabid fanbases who refuse to let artists die? And how moral is it to release art without the artist’s say-so?
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Below, HipHopDX looks at some of the most disappointing posthumous rap projects to ever be released, with the singular rule of one album per artist (otherwise this list would mostly be made up of 2Pac).
10. Miles Davis — Doo-Bop (1992)
Likely the first ever posthumous rap album, the jazz legend’s foray into Hip Hop shortly before his death in 1991 has now largely been forgotten. Produced along with Easy Mo Bee who was left in charge of the project following Davis’ passing, Doo-Bop contains many of the hallmarks that would plague the posthumous projects in the decades to come: it’s jigsawed together by scraps, has a sense of incompletion and inconsistent with the creator’s work while they were still alive.
9. Gang Starr — One of the Best Yet (2019)
While the beats are expectedly impeccable, there’s a large Guru-shaped hole in Gang Starr‘s sole posthumous release. Court cases and legal wrangling pre-dated One of the Best Yet as DJ Premier and Guru were estranged at the time of the rapper’s death in 2010 — and that encapsulates the album. There are flashes of the old Gang Starr, but ultimately the album was pulled together from Guru acapella recordings and separately-made DJ Premier beats, making the dissonance too much to overcome.
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8. Eazy-E — Str8 Off Tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton (1996)
Dropping less than a year after the N.W.A founder’s death from AIDS in 1995, Eazy-E‘s sophomore solo album was pieced together using recordings from the planned 1993 album Temporary Insanity. DJ Yella came in to put the album together and regardless of how he assembled the various Eazy leftovers, this is far from the gangsta rap legend’s best work.
7. Lil Peep — Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 (2018)
A superstar to a certain section of Gen Z-ers before his death from a drug overdose in 2017, Lil Peep‘s music was typified by explicit raps about anxiety, suicide and rampant drug use. Pieced together from leftovers from his debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 allowing people to profit from the 21-year-old rapping about addiction months after overdosing on fentanyl and cocaine (and a host of other narcotics) still feels eerie and irresponsible.
6. Juice WRLD — Fighting Demons (2021)
Juice WRLD allegedly left behind thousands of songs when he died of a drug overdose in 2019. Two full-length posthumous albums and one more on the way are only a pebble in the ocean if that is true. While Legends Never Die was a poignant goodbye to a pioneering artist, the follow-up Fighting Demons proved that lightning does not strike twice. Though mercifully free of swathes of features, it was very clear that the Juice WRLD well had run dry.
5. XXXTENTACION — Skins (2018)
For every good idea, XXXTENTACION had, he also had about 10 bad ones. Skins, released just months after the controversial rapper’s 2018 murder, is a Frankenstein creation of genres that range from screamo to X’s own brand of acoustic rap, with no song even having a sense of completion. X’s label has only continued to cash in on his brand in the years since.
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4. The Notorious B.I.G. — Duets: The Final Chapter (2005)
Method Man put it best when he said: “They got n-ggas on that album Big would have never rocked with.” As the only guest feature on Biggie’s classic debut album Ready to Die, the Wu-Tang Clan legend saw the repackaging of old verses and freestyles as blatantly commercial collaborations with artists as random as Jagged Edge, Akon and nu metal rockers Korn for the cynical cash-in it was. Fans didn’t necessarily see things the same way, though, as “Nasty Girl” was a big hit while the album itself sold almost half a million copies in its first week.
3. Pop Smoke — Shoot For the Stars, Aim For the Moon (2020)
There’s unfinished and there’s Pop Smoke’s posthumous album unfinished. The project, overseen by his mentor 50 Cent and manager Steven Victor, features snippets of verses the Brooklyn rapper recorded before his murder, with guest artists completing the songs. Aside from the poor quality of much of the album — from the highly auto-tuned mixing to get around the substandard master recordings to the ghostly absence of Pop’s charisma — having a rapper who was shot to death sample 50’s “Many Men” seems ill-thought out at best.
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2. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes — Eye Legacy (2009)
One of the strangest albums ever released, Eye Legacy encapsulated everything wrong with the cynical posthumous projects. A kind-of remix of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes’ debut album Supernova, Eye Legacy is banded together with worse production and shocking features that makes the TLC member feel like an intruder on her own album. Guests have never been more random than Chamillionaire and Bobby V. A horror use of a seminal talent.
1. 2Pac — Loyal to the Game (2004)
2Pac, of course, made one of the greatest posthumous albums of all time with The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, which was completed by the time he was murdered. But in his wake has been a never-ending stream of bastardized releases. The nadir of these is the Eminem-produced Loyal to the Game. While the album boasts the soaring pop rap of “Ghetto Gospel,” the drastic editing of ‘Pac’s vocals (including having the West Coast legend appear to shout out G-Unit) makes this an affront to the Hip Hop Gods. The Dido sample, in particular, is a low point.
