In July 2026, 50 Cent said the theme song for the Street Fighter film is a track with Eminem and previously unreleased vocals from 2Pac, cleared by the estate rather than generated. The film opens on 16 October.6
Twenty-seven years after his major-label debut, that is still where Eminem lives: on somebody else's record, in somebody else's category, holding his own. He entered the Rock Hall in 2022, eligible for the first time that year, under a citation naming him the single best-selling artist of the 2000s.1
Fifteen of the rankings here have him somewhere in the field. Most are not about rap at all.
Rap lists rank Eminem for technique. Everyone else's lists rank him for reach. The two Eminems almost never land in the same place.
Eminem vs Tupac: the greatest-rapper list
The broadest question in hip-hop puts sixty-four names on one screen, and it is the only ranking here where Eminem's entire case has to be argued at once.
His credentials are unusual for the category. Fifteen Grammy wins, four of them for Best Rap Album, and he was the first artist to take that award for three consecutive releases.2
Tupac Shakur is the counterweight, and the case against Eminem starts exactly where his case ends. Awards and sales are not what this list has historically measured. Influence is, and the names around him — Biggie, Nas, Jay-Z, Rakim, Kendrick Lamar — are ranked on who came after them.
The Marshall Mathers LP or The Eminem Show
Narrow the question to his own catalogue and the field becomes twelve albums, all of them his.
The Marshall Mathers LP arrived on 23 May 2000 and became the fastest-selling studio album by any solo artist in American music history, a record that stood for fifteen years until Adele released 25.3
The Eminem Show followed two years later, sold on a scale the first record had only pointed at, and is the one most listeners name when they mean his peak.
The list does not stop at the good ones. Encore, Relapse and Revival are all on it, which is what makes a single-artist ranking honest rather than a victory lap.
Lose Yourself vs Stan: one song for the catalogue
Thirty-two Eminem songs, and the two at the front were written for completely different reasons.
"Lose Yourself" was written for a film, took the 2003 Oscar for Best Original Song, and was the first hip-hop track in that category.2
"Stan" was a four-minute short story about an obsessive fan that ends with a car going off a bridge. It put a word in the dictionary. Nothing on the list has travelled further from music into ordinary English.
The rest of the field splits by decade. A listener who arrived through "My Name Is" and one who arrived through "Godzilla" are answering different questions with the same thirty-two options.
Illmatic, Ready to Die, and a debut from 1999
Here the timing works against him. The Slim Shady LP came out in February 1999, with ten months of the decade left.
Everything else on the list had already happened. Nas released Illmatic in 1994, The Notorious B.I.G. released Ready to Die the same year, Dr. Dre's The Chronic landed in 1992 and the Wu-Tang Clan's debut in 1993. By the time Eminem arrived, the canon of 1990s hip-hop was essentially written.
His entry is the newcomer in a room of established records, which is a rare position for him on this site.
Eminem vs Jay-Z: the album of the 2000s
Move the window ten years forward and the position inverts completely.
Eminem is the only artist with two entries on this list, The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, released two years apart at the exact centre of the decade's commercial peak. The Rock Hall's citation for him is built on this stretch: best-selling artist of the 2000s, and the first artist with ten consecutive No. 1 debut albums on the Billboard 200.1
Jay-Z's The Blueprint is the record that beats him on reputation. Released on 11 September 2001, produced largely by Kanye West and Just Blaze, it is the album most often named when critics pick the decade's best.
Kanye West appears three times on the same list, with The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation. The decade Eminem sold is not automatically the decade he defined.
Detroit vs Chicago: the Midwest rap album
Rap's geography usually runs New York against Los Angeles, and this ranking throws out both.
What is left is a regional scene Eminem is the most famous export of, and a list where the competition is entirely local. Kanye West's The College Dropout is Chicago. So are Common's Be, Twista's Adrenaline Rush and Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book.
Detroit's other entry is Royce da 5'9"'s Book of Ryan, from the MC who has been Eminem's collaborator since 1998 and half of Bad Meets Evil.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony come from Cleveland, Tech N9ne from Kansas City, Atmosphere from Minneapolis. Nobody outside the Midwest is eligible, and the map is the whole point.
Eminem vs Lil Wayne: rap that crossed all the way over
This ranking measures the thing Eminem's critics hold against him and his record label counted in millions.
Crossover means a rap album that reached listeners who did not otherwise buy rap, and The Marshall Mathers LP is close to the definition of one. It set the solo fastest-selling record in American history and held it for fifteen years.3
Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III is the modern comparison, and the older entries show how long the category has existed. Run-DMC's Raising Hell put Aerosmith on rap radio in 1986. The Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill followed months later.
MC Hammer and Will Smith are on the list too, which is the quiet warning inside it. Crossing over has never been the same thing as being respected for it.
Renegade: sixteen bars on Jay-Z's own album
One track, on a record belonging to someone else, and rap fans have been arguing about it for twenty-five years.
"Renegade" closes side A of The Blueprint. Eminem produced it and took the second verse, and the claim that he outrapped the album's owner on his own release became permanent when Nas said so on "Ether" three months later.
The rest of this ranking is a catalogue of the same move. Kendrick Lamar on Big Sean's "Control" named sixteen of his peers and restarted the competitive era. Nicki Minaj's verse on Kanye West's "Monster" shares a track with Jay-Z and Rick Ross. Busta Rhymes on A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" launched a career in eight bars.
Andre 3000 opens UGK's "Int'l Players Anthem" before the beat arrives, which is the one entry here that competes on pure theatre.
Eminem vs Twista: the fastest rapper argument
"Rap God" is the exhibit everyone cites, and it is worth being precise about what it proves. One stretch of the third verse runs at a speed most listeners cannot follow on first hearing, and it is the most-quoted speed run in mainstream rap.
Twista is the reason the qualifier matters. The Chicago MC held a Guinness World Record for fastest rap in the early 1990s, years before Eminem had a major-label deal, and built an entire style on it rather than one verse.
Tech N9ne, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Kool G Rap are all here for the same reason, and Big Daddy Kane was doing double-time in 1988.
Daveed Diggs is the outlier and the best argument that the category is bigger than rap: his "Guns and Ships" verse in Hamilton is among the fastest in Broadway history.
Lollapalooza, 2011: a rapper on Metallica's stage
Lollapalooza started in 1991 as a touring alternative-rock festival, and its headline history reads accordingly.
Jane's Addiction, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam and Metallica are all on this list. Eminem headlined in 2011, the same weekend the festival drew its largest crowds to that point.
He is not the only rapper here. Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper share the category, and Paul McCartney sits at the other end of it.
Stadium-scale is not new ground for him either. He performed at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show in February 2022 alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, the first halftime show to win the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special.4
8 Mile vs Bohemian Rhapsody: the biopic that isn't
8 Mile is filed here as a music biopic, and it is the only entry on the list that is not one.
Curtis Hanson's 2002 film gives Eminem a different name, a fictional girlfriend and an invented rap-battle plot. What it borrows is the setting and the shape: a broke kid from a Detroit trailer park, a factory shift, a microphone. Close enough that the category absorbed it.
Everything around it is the real thing. Ray covers Ray Charles, Walk the Line covers Johnny Cash, Bohemian Rhapsody covers Freddie Mercury, and each of those won an acting Oscar or came close.
Straight Outta Compton is the closest comparison and the sharper contrast: N.W.A's story told by the surviving members, with actors playing them, rather than a rapper playing a version of himself.
An Oscar for a rap song, next to Over the Rainbow
Hip-hop plays no part in this category. Eminem qualifies on a rule about where a song first appeared, not on genre.
"Lose Yourself" took Best Original Song at the 75th Academy Awards in March 2003, the first rap record ever to win that category.2 He did not attend, and the award was collected on his behalf.
The company is the point. Judy Garland's "Over the Rainbow" from 1939, Bing Crosby's "White Christmas", Henry Mancini's "Moon River", Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On", Elton John, Adele, Bruce Springsteen.
Three years after "Lose Yourself", Three 6 Mafia won for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" from Hustle & Flow, which makes rap two-for-two in a category otherwise dominated by show tunes and power ballads.
The Eminem Show among Abbey Road and Thriller
Sixty-four albums, every genre, and one Eminem record made the cut.
The Eminem Show sits with four Beatles albums, three Pink Floyd albums, Thriller, Rumours, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Rap gets a handful of entries in total, among them Illmatic, The Chronic and two Kendrick Lamar albums.
Scale stops helping here. Every other name on the list sold on the same order and has had thirty extra years to become canon.
Revival: the album that scored 50
Every subject in this format needs one list they would rather not be on. Eminem is on this one twice.
Revival came out on 15 December 2017 and carries a Metacritic weighted average of 50 out of 100 from 24 critics, the lowest of his career.5 Encore, from 2004, is the other entry, and it followed the three-album run that won him consecutive Grammys.
The company is heavy. Metallica's St. Anger and Lulu, Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy after fifteen years in the studio, U2's Songs of Innocence pushed unrequested into half a billion iTunes libraries, and Jay-Z's Kingdom Come, which Jay-Z has called his own weakest record.
The Clash's Cut the Crap is the extreme case: made without Mick Jones in 1985 and effectively disowned by the band.
What links every album here is a preceding run good enough to make the next record a disappointment. That is a backhanded qualification, and it is one Eminem earned twice.
Eminem vs Drake: the overrated argument
Being on this list requires being rated highly in the first place, which is the trap built into the question.
Eminem's presence has a specific charge behind it. He is the most technically fluent MC in the mainstream and the best-selling one, and the case against him is that those two facts have been allowed to settle a debate they do not actually settle.
Drake is the modern version of the same complaint, scaled to streaming. Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne are all here for variations on it.
The bottom of the list is a different category entirely. Vanilla Ice, Iggy Azalea and Lil Pump are not disputed cases, and having Eminem in the same field as them is exactly the kind of filing this article keeps running into.
Fifteen filings, one Detroit rapper
The rap rankings and the everything-else rankings are measuring two different men. One is a technician with four Best Rap Album Grammys and a verse people still time with a stopwatch; the other is a commercial event large enough to end up next to Abbey Road and Over the Rainbow. His most recent album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), arrived in July 2024 and is built around killing off the first of those two.7
Fifteen questions produced fifteen different filings, and every one of them is defensible. That is what happens when a subject is scored one matchup at a time instead of being handed a single number.
Know someone who keeps surfacing in categories that share no common ground? Build a ranking for them and see where the disagreement really sits.
More rankings, more angles
- Beyoncé Doesn't Rank the Same Way Twice — 35 Grammys, and a country album nobody saw coming
- The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones, Ranked Side by Side — the argument that has run since 1963
- How to Create a Head-to-Head Ranking — build one in a couple of minutes
Sources
- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — Eminem inductee page (2022 induction, best-selling artist of the 2000s, ten consecutive No. 1 debut albums): rockhall.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Wikipedia — List of awards and nominations received by Eminem (15 Grammy wins, four Best Rap Album awards, three consecutive, and the 2003 Academy Award for Best Original Song): en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-07)
- uDiscover Music — The Marshall Mathers LP release date and its fastest-selling solo studio album record: udiscovermusic.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Deadline — Super Bowl LVI halftime show wins Outstanding Variety Special, the first halftime show to do so: deadline.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Wikipedia — Revival (Eminem album), citing a Metacritic weighted average of 50 out of 100 from 24 critic scores, and a 15 December 2017 release: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-07)
- NME — 50 Cent confirms the Street Fighter theme with Eminem and unreleased 2Pac vocals, film released 16 October 2026: nme.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Wikipedia — The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), released July 2024: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-07)