2PAC

Posthumous 2Pac (Tupac Shakur) albums are almost a festive-season staple. Pac's Life is, lamentably, the late rapper's 11th posthumous album. The post-Shakur industry is still picking at the corpse, but the bones are looking bare a decade after his death.

Yet Pac's Life is hardly the worst in the series. Unlike the bloated, Eminem-produced Loyal to the Game in 2004, this album is listenable. But the problem for all Tupac fans (and, let's face it, who else is going to run out and buy this?) is that this album, like the ones that preceded it, relies on re-interpretations of Tupac's work.

Producer Swizz Beats has worked some studio loops into Shakur's vocals on the opener, Untouchable, making what was a smooth freestyle into, well, something else. And when new-school MC T.I. exchanges rhymes with Shakur on the title track, there are notes of reverence but also opportunism - it's almost the sound of someone having their photo taken at his gravesite.

It's tragic that Shakur's legacy is being pillaged, but the bigger tragedy is that all these posthumous albums make Shakur sound like something he wasn't: a mediocre rapper