It’s been more than a decade since Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. broke the bank with their industry-inflated bi-coastal beef. But if the brief lives of these two iconic rappers made for sober life lessons, the marketing ploy lives on. Next week, new albums from both Kanye West and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson hit stores, and for some reason, the fate of hiphop, of pop music, and, if the impassioned Internet music chatter about the situation is to be believed, the morality of this great nation is at stake (50 Cent has even vowed to retire if he doesn’t outsell Mr. West). But the simultaneous release of “Graduation” and “Curtis” isn’t some crossroads in music or hip-hop — it’s purely ingenious advertising.

Even aside from the fact that neither rapper is a dazzling MC — the two are so unalike that the made-up friction between them is patently absurd. And the difference is noticed inside the first few seconds of each album. The “Good Morning (introduction),” on Mr. West’s “Graduation,” marries an easygoing beat to a church-like organ line and a female voice to underscore Mr. West’s typically self-reflexive hand-wringing over his own life. “Curtis” opens over a mournful guitar arpeggio and a sample from some British crime movie featuring a man buying a firearm. Both let you know what is about to follow: conflicted, confessional storytelling from Mr. West and pure gangsta rap product from Mr. Jackson.

Mr. West’s is, expectedly, the more musically ambitious of the two, and he has crafted one of the more creative pop hip-hop albums in some time. Taking sampling cues from a wide spectrum that includes Michael Jackson, Laura Nyro, YoungJeezy, and Daft Punk, “Graduation” is a radical departure from the warm, jazzy soul Mr. West favored on his first two albums, and the eclectic sources steer the album toward luscious, rhythmically inventive terrain. Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” is twisted into a syncopated beat buzz on “Champion,” Krautrock legend Can’s dizzying, psychedelic downer “Sing Swan Song” gets transmogrified into the melodic line and backing mood track to the bizarre, potentially satirical “Drunk and Hot Girls.”

It’s that “potentially” that makes the song — and the album — so slippery. As breathtaking as the music is, the clumsy lyrics border on self-parody. Yes, it could be a mordantly comical take on a guy who trolls for one-night stands at last call — Mr. West actually raps a slurred, nonsensical line as an example of how it may sound — but at the same time he makes these same women out to be the problem. It takes two to tango, and following his 2005 smash hit “Gold Digger” — and the slightly wistful remembrance of a status-symbol girl lost in “Flashing Lights” (“she don’t believe in shooting stars / but she believe in shoes and cars”) here — if Mr. West has such troubles with money-hungry women, maybe one of his friends, or his mother, should tell him to stop picking them up in bars.

Mr. West is the most self-obsessed emo-style rapper in pop, but he’s covering much the same personal story-telling ground from his first two albums, “The College Dropout” and “Late Registration,” without adding those wrinkles of observational detachment that yielded “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” (from the former) and “All Falls Down” (from the latter). “Graduation” is too often merely about the struggles that come with stardom.

Fortunately it’s not all navel gazing. The best tracks here — the fantastic “Good Life,” the fuzztone guitar- and piano-driven “Big Brother,” and the fabulous, gospel-powered “The Glory” and “Homecoming” — highlight Mr. West’s best traits: unedited sincerity and an impeccable pop sense. “Good Life” and “Homecoming,” especially, are minor works of pop greatness, the former a feel-good weekend afternoon jam, the latter one of those rare moments when wistful nostalgia doesn’t become maudlin.

“Curtis” doesn’t deviate from Mr. Jackson’s big beat, bass-heavy brand of rap one bit. Anything with a casual cadence or dance-floor-ready boom is a perfect spine for Mr. Jackson’s sleepy paced stiletto rhymes that cove the usual territory: the perils of street life, the redemption of stardom, and the material benefits of the new lifestyle. Perhaps that explains why, at 17 tracks, “Curtis” is about six or seven songs too long: Mr. Jackson knows better than to release an album that’s short on product. If fans are going to plunk down their hard-earned money, he’s going to give them their money’s worth.

And so he delivers: “Curtis” features six big-beat, rough-and-tumble 50 Cent tracks, from “I Still Kill” and the scorching “I Get Money” — the best jam here — to the fuzzy, squishy bass and drums of “Fire” the and soul-powered love song “All of Me.” For his third album, Mr. Jackson doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken: There’s a reason his 2005 “The Massacre” and 2003’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” moved more than 12 million copies in America.

But at least Mr. Jackson doesn’t play coy with his success. Mr. West rhymes about fame — his own, how he got there, the problems and pressures of maintaining it, and how it affects his personal and social life. Mr. Jackson hits all the gansta rap basics. Mr. West is the ambitious, confessional singer/songwriter, which is why he is so adored by critics and so easily crosses over into pop — he’s vulnerable and unthreatening. Mr. Jackson is a populist giving people the hard-edged bangers that they want, so much so that on the “clean” version of his album, a handful of tracks are rendered incoherent by his profligate use of profanity. Both approaches tailor themselves practically for their target markets: “Graduation” is perfect for iPod headphone consumption; “Curtis” is ideal for booming out an SUV at intestine-rattling volume.

But the release-date face-off only comes down to one thing: Who is sitting at the no. 1 spot atop the album sales chart at the end of the week. When all the chips are down, it’s all about getting paid.