![]() Whether he’s able to transform a well-worn genre remains to be seen. The rumors continue to spread-a public beef with Ja Rule and Irv Gotti, a rumored link to Jam Master Jay’s murder-but 50 Cent will probably be a fixture for a while, especially since his hat is bulletproof. (On “Fuck You,” from Guess Who’s Back?, 50 attributes this change to his shooting: “I’ve been shot nine times, my nigga, that’s why I walk funny/ Hit in the jaw once, that’s why I talk funny.”) Who he sounds like now is John Wayne, and what sells better than a cowboy? Paralleling Eminem’s transformation from a generic gangsta on his underground debut, Infinite, into a clipped, nasally “white” scimitar on The Slim Shady LP, 50’s added some Southern twang to his serviceable grumble (he announces that “ I’m a New Yorker, but I sound Southern” and modified it by rhyming as if he can’t open his mouth. (His training as a drug dealer may have had a hand in this.)ĥ0 Cent did learn one move from Eminem: He changed his voice. 50 Cent is, by comparison, a firmly 21 st-century artist, offering a solid brand with little variation in delivery. Strobing between self-doubt and dreams of holy war, Nas is a literate, complex MC, so fallibly caught up in his own art that he can’t tell the difference between his brilliant songs (“Made You Look” and “One Mic”) and his terrible set pieces (“Got UR Self a Gun”). And it’s Nas who 50 Cent least resembles, though the two have recorded together. He has some of Jay-Z’s coldblooded humor and laid-back reserve but less of his wordplay and conceptual depth. 50 Cent deals almost exclusively in boasts and threats, finding remarkable elasticity in the concept of shooting people. 50 Cent’s confidence and fearless gun talk recall Biggie but without the autobiographical details and narratives. 50 Cent made this boast technically true by generating widespread acceptance at the street level, but the aesthetic comparisons work less well. There are numerous references on his street CDs to being on par with Jay-Z, Biggie, Tupac, and Nas. Like Eminem and Jay-Z (and, hell, John Milton), 50 thinks about his position in the pecking order. ![]() A line from “U Not Like Me” (one of the tracks from Guess Who’s Back? appended to Get Rich as bonus tracks) sums up 50’s existentialist word skills: “Shell hit my jaw, I ain’t wait for doctor to get it out/ Hit my wisdom tooth–hock-too!-I spit it out/ I don’t smile a lot, cause ain’t nothin’ pretty/ Got a purple heart for war, and I ain’t never left the city.” 50 is a terse, funny MC with more sang-froid than seems healthy, and his previous work is like 10 years of gangsta aesthetics compressed into one machinelike performer. Though there are eight or even 10 solid songs on the album, much of what makes 50 Cent stand out-his implacable perspective and humor-is missing. Dre, Eminem, Sha Money XL, and others, Get Rich is not exactly the same 50 Cent the streets celebrated. It will probably do 3 million, if not more, before the end of 2003. 50’s legit debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), was released on Feb. For a cool $1.6 million, Eminem’s label, Shady, and Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records, absorbed the only real threat to Eminem’s hegemony into their fold. A great start with a depressingly common end, people thought.Įminem, having entered the major-label bidding war for 50 Cent, emerged victorious after several months. Columbia dropped 50 Cent, and rumors circulated that he had gone back to selling crack. In 2000, 50 Cent was shot nine times in the face and body in front of his grandmother’s house. An album, Power of a Dollar, was recorded for Columbia but never reached stores (though the street knows it well now). The second single, “Thug Love,” featured Destiny’s Child moments before they became globally known. 50 Cent’s first single was one of 1999’s most unusual radio hits, “How To Rob,” a comic list of hip-hop celebrities he planned to mug: “I’d rob ODB but that’d be a waste of time … I’d rob Pun without a gun, snatch his piece and run/ This nigga weigh 400 pounds, how he gon’ catch me, son?” Ballsy and clever, the track made it clear 50 Cent was not a docile genre rapper. Orphaned at 8 when his drug-dealing mother was shot in front of him, 50 Cent turned to dealing and was stabbed once and jailed numerous times in the ‘90s. Born 27 years ago in Queens as Curtis Jackson, 50 Cent is the biggest news in hip-hop, and he’s got a back story ready for TV. It’s the kind of boast that might show up in 50 Cent’s rhymes. Selling legitimate pressings of major-label releases and gray-market mix CDs, the lone vendor said two remarkable words when I asked if he had any 50 Cent albums: “Sold out.” When you buy street CDs, nothing’s ever sold out. 25, the bootleg-CD sellers that line Canal Street in downtown Manhattan were absent, save one.
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