Always remember his debut.
Some musicians have their genius slowly revealed, circling around big themes, working with producer to producer, slowing honing their art until eventually, their grand theory comes to pass.
Others bottle lightning — their entire life’s work and experience surmised in their debut album before they head into a slow decline. It’s said you have your entire life to make your debut, two years to make a sequel, and by the third, you’re on tour so much and so devoid of music to listen to other than your own, that your senior album is a misplaced incestuous creation.
For 50 Cent, his rise and rise was wholly different.
No one. NO ONE announced their arrival onto the music scene with as much force as him.
Look at the In Da Club video. REALLY look at it. The world’s (supposed) greatest rapper in Eminem, teaming up with the world’s (supposed) greatest producer in Dr. Dre to produce 50 Cent.
Two hip hop heroes made a new champion in a laboratory to take the genre to new heights… and the creation was a hulking six foot black man who looked like he burst out of a comic book.
Take the entrance 50 makes. You get half glimpses of a war bunker that wouldn’t look out of place in a Marvel movie, and then Curtis falls into camera shot upside down, seemingly in the middle of doing some gnarly sit ups.
Before your brain even adjusts to what you’re looking at — a man who looks like he should be challenging for a boxing title, (I’m still tickled by the rumours 50 beat up Floyd Mayweather behind closed doors. Apparently “there are weight classes for a reason”), 50 starts barking at you.
Go, go, go, go go, go, go, shawty
It’s your birthday
We gon’ party like it’s yo birthday
We gon’ sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday
And you know we don’t give a fuck
It’s not your birthday!
Bang. 50 had rapped a refrain that was both a club banger, and still cute enough for a nine year old to copy and get away with.
In five lines, 50 Cent had made it.
Hip hop as a genre abhors a vacuum. Battle raps, diss songs, general beefs and subliminals — at the end of each year, hip hop needs someone to stand tall and declare what each year was about. (2016 was the year of Chance the Rapper, with a special mention to Anderson Paak). If someone fails to take the crown, then the medium stutters, wondering what to do with the lack of direction (see 2014 and 2012, where the usual heavyweights took time off and the biggest hip hop act ended up being RICK ROSS.)
50 Cent understood this dynamic more than most. His ascent through the rankings was akin to Tyson in the late 80s/early 90s. Fiddy tore through hip hop’s elite division on the rise to the top. As the genre stumbled, still woozy from a hangover excesses of the 90s heyday, 50 savaged rivals and turned some of the key acts of the moment into punchlines.
Fiddy ruined Ja Rule. He RUINED him. I really can’t overstate how damaging 50 Cent was to Ja Rule’s career. Much like NWA put an end to Sir Mix A Lot’s corny advert raps, so did 50 Cent stub a cigarette in Ja Rule’s face.
In the early 2000s Ja Rule was one of the most profitable hip hop/RnB acts in the world. Today he exists as a joke, shorthand for something that used to be a big deal a while ago. Last year, Dave Chappelle joked “that Al Qaeda is the Ja Rule of terrorist organisations.” That’s what 50 Cent did to him. 50 turned his biggest rival into such an irrelevance that he is better known as a punchline to Dave Chappelle jokes.
(To date, the only person who has truly survived rap beef with 50 Cent is, strangely, Rick Ross.)
But what was smart about 50 was, even though he purported to be the nine times shot return of gangster rap, he was a strange combination of all the “corny” and extra curricular stuff he decried as “watering down hip hop”.
What I’m trying to say is, 50 Cent had no problem selling out. In fact, to this day it is probably his best skill. He made multi millions selling vitaminwater to Coca Cola, and he was one of the first big artists to realise that the rise in digital sales would see artists return to touring again.
50 Cent was one of the first to realise a artist nowdays gets rich from selling t-shirts at their gigs.
“In Da Club” got 50 Cent his first ever number one, staying in the charts for the best part of 30 weeks in 2003.
While 50 may be better known now for his Twitter and Instagram antics and his slow slide into Don King realms of “power x petty” business shenanigans, it’s worth remembering, some 14 years on, just how devastating his debut was.
Even Beyonce remixed his track ffs…
I’m going to keep doing these blogs on a weekly basis in an effort to kind my writing pen sharp while I look for a job. If you like my writing and would like to hire me, I can be found at carlanka.me
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