2Pac was a product of a very specific set of circumstances that don't exist anymore - the Black Panther legacy of the family, the crack epidemic of the 80s, the overall content of hip-hop in the late 80s (a lot more political than ever since), the lack of the kind of differentiation between subgenres of hip-hop that set in later, etc. and this all coincided with the Golden Age of hip-hop.
All of those things came together and you had an incredibly talented person to take advantage of them and create timeless masterpieces. But the environment does not really exist anymore - back then you could both be making politically and socially conscious music and have it sound hardcore and appeal to both the streets and the masses. It does not happen anymore - the conscious rappers are relegated to their special niche and are mostly making soft music appealing to hipsters, while the hardcore sound is trap music, which just does not lend itself to deep lyricism. I would very much like to see someone try to merge those things but I have hard time seeing how it's going to work - those beats are hard-hitting but they just naturally go with simplistic lyrics about sex, drugs and violence. So you have these divisions in hip-hop - in the mainstream you mostly have gay pop music that can hardly be called hip-hop, then you have the more "intellectual" type of stuff that is in its own bubble, then there is the trap, etc., and they don't really mix. Also, nobody is really rapping with the same energy and intensity as he did back then. So it is very hard to see how someone else who can transcend all those different aspects of hip-hop (the political and conscious message, the party music, the gangsta tales), appeal to everyone, make it into the mainstream, and do it while putting so much passion into his music, will emerge any time soon.
All of those things came together and you had an incredibly talented person to take advantage of them and create timeless masterpieces. But the environment does not really exist anymore - back then you could both be making politically and socially conscious music and have it sound hardcore and appeal to both the streets and the masses. It does not happen anymore - the conscious rappers are relegated to their special niche and are mostly making soft music appealing to hipsters, while the hardcore sound is trap music, which just does not lend itself to deep lyricism. I would very much like to see someone try to merge those things but I have hard time seeing how it's going to work - those beats are hard-hitting but they just naturally go with simplistic lyrics about sex, drugs and violence. So you have these divisions in hip-hop - in the mainstream you mostly have gay pop music that can hardly be called hip-hop, then you have the more "intellectual" type of stuff that is in its own bubble, then there is the trap, etc., and they don't really mix. Also, nobody is really rapping with the same energy and intensity as he did back then. So it is very hard to see how someone else who can transcend all those different aspects of hip-hop (the political and conscious message, the party music, the gangsta tales), appeal to everyone, make it into the mainstream, and do it while putting so much passion into his music, will emerge any time soon.
