Tupac Shakur’s Favorite Artist Of All Time Revealed!

Tupac Shakur’s Favorite Artist Of All Time Revealed! It’s not surprising that musicians love music, but truth be told, rap appears to be so distinct from the other genres that it always turns a few heads around when a Hip-Hop artist reveals their favorite musician outside of Hip-Hop. It’s rather a common happening though with Dr. Dre having declared his love for Nirvana, Kanye West heaping praise on The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and ICE T announcing his passion for death metal. Nevertheless, it still looks somewhat awkward.

Tupac Shakur is without a doubt the biggest rapper of all time; and at the very least, he cruises into the top 5. That said, it’s not without surprise that the icon of the hip hop world had his ear open to all sorts of inspiration. 

Back in 2016, a letter that the Tupac wrote to his high school crush at the age of 17 went up for auction, and two things were revealed. One, it showed that besides his tough outward appearance, he also had his soft side. Two, it confirmed the rap icon’s love for Prince. 

“‘We both love Prince we have both had heartbreak and we both adore candles,” the rapper wrote in his letter to his crush, a girl by the name Beethoven for her virtuoso piano playing.  It’s not clear if the letter secured him a date with his crush or not but as a historical document, it is certainly of interest. So much so that that it fetched £24,000 ($33,000) at auction. 

This is not the first time his love for the guitar icon formerly known as Prince has been revealed. Tupac’s cousin by the name Jamila Barnes, during an interview with BETNetworks, revealed that Tupac would set up home concerts among themselves when they were young, “he would have us perform different groups, but his favorite that he would have us perform over and over again, would be Prince and The Revolution, and the main song we always did was ‘1999’.”

“We would sing into a spoon,” Barnes adds, “and he would introduce the ‘band’ in all his Prince glory, fully in character.” 

Over the course of his phenomenal career, which was cut short tragically, Tupac sampled Prince’s ‘Do Me Baby’ for his ode to the City of Angels with ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’, as well as ‘Me and My Girlfriend’ another track penned under his Makaveli that samples ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.