Never before has rap needed someone as bad as it needs 50 Cent right now. One glance at TRL or quick listen to rap radio tells you all you need to know about the state of commercial hip hop: you’ve got Ja Rule rapping about Ashanti’s lips, Jay-Z rapping about being on the run with Beyoncé, LL Cool J rapping about how J. Lo is all he has, and Nelly rapping about his true love his shoes.
It seems like everyone agrees that rap is in a stagnant state, but it also seems like already famous rappers would rather run to the Bentley dealership than do anything about breathing new life into the music.
But out of the fray comes 50 Cent, a 26-year old Queens-born MC who first started making noise four years ago with his hilarious single ‘How to Rob,’ which featured comical rhymes about mugging famous rappers.
50’s debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, was released by Eminem’s Shady Records on February 6th and sold over 850,000 copies in just four days a record for first week sales for a debut LP. His Dr. Dre-produced single, ‘In Da Club,’ is the most inescapable banger since the band-aided one’s ‘Hot in Herre.’
But it hasn’t been all success for 50 Cent. In fact, his unparalleled and unlikely rags-to-riches tale has been marked by frustration and tragedy at every turn.
50 Cent, born Curtis Jackson, never knew his father, and his drug-hustling mother was killed when he was just six years old.
As a teenager, 50 began dealing crack and amassing a rap sheet to rival R. Kelly’s though filled with more guns and fewer girls. Somewhere along the way, though, he began taking rap seriously, and he eventually signed with Columbia Records. 50 was set to release his debut album, Power of the Dollar, but he was dropped by the label soon after being shot nine times (including a 9 mm bullet to the face) outside of his grandparents’ house.
When he left the hospital, 50 Cent started on the tear that would lead him to fame and fortune. He recorded song after song at a ferocious pace, building unprecedented buzz by releasing the tracks on mixtapes that were pirated around the country. One of these makeshift albums, Guess Who’s Back?, fell into the hands of Eminem, who signed 50 Cent to a contract reported to contain a $1 million advance.
But is 50 Cent worth all the hype? Get Rich… is a gangsta rap classic, an album that’s as essential a first statement as Nas’s Illmatic or Biggie’s Ready to Die. 50 Cent delivers by rapping about what he knows his songs are deeply personal tales of drugs, violence and retribution that shun gaudy beats in favor of drop-dead lyricism. He shuns high profile guest appearances for the most part (Eminem does drop a couple verses), creating an individual and unique testament of the streets.
The album kicks off with ‘What Up Gangsta,’ which doubles as an anthem both for himself and his G-Unit posse. In it, 50 delivers the theme for the whole record when he wonders, ‘When niggaz bump my st/ Can they hear my hunger?’
Get Rich… is an album marked by hunger 50 hungers for success, hungers for recognition (but not acceptance) and hungers for any excuse to go off. He openly talks about killing people in his songs, and taking his past into consideration, you have to take him seriously. He philosophizes about his own fate, alternately shunning God while pleading for his soul on the album’s sobering highlight, ‘Many Men (Wish Death).’ He raps, ‘Lord, I don’t cry no more/ Don’t look to the sky no more/ Have mercy on me.’
Pretty soon you need a breather from all the talk of guns and death, and you get it in the form of ‘In Da Club.’ Another feature that makes this album great is its pacing; things get dark and serious, but there’s always a catchy head-nodder around the corner whether it’s ‘In Da Club,’ or the steel drum-laden ‘P.I.M.P.,’ the added-on bonus track ‘Wanksta.’
If there’s a weakness on 50 Cent’s debut, it’s when he strays from preaching about the violence that made him who he is. When he raps about celebrating drugs (‘High All the Time’) or women (’21 Questions,’ featuring the ubiquitous Nate Dogg), it comes across as forced and inauthentic. 50 should not have time for getting stoned and talking game while he has so many axes to grind.
50 Cent now has the world in the palm of his hands, and whether he loses his edge and starts dueting with an R’B diva is completely up to him. A bad sign is the video for ‘In Da Club,’ which features a buff and shirtless 50 rapping to hoards of dancing Britney wannabes. But, for now anyway, it appears that Tupac Shakur infact is still alive his influence and spirit live on in the bullet-scarred mouth of 50 Cent.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
