He's cool. Dead cool (original) (raw)

His sculpted face gazes out at the world from the cover of his album, a likeness replicated on fly-posters around the country. If you look carefully, you can see an irregularity in his cheek, where a 9mm bullet dislodged one of his teeth. The image invites us to linger on the rapper's body. His torso is muscular and alive with tattoos. The shot cuts away at the former boxer's waist, concealing his hands; the skin on his right is puckered by the impact of another bullet. There is more scar tissue on his thighs, where a further seven projectiles once lodged. Then there is the stab wound. It required only a few stitches, unlike the fortnight in hospital that the volley of lead consigned him to, almost two years ago.

The rapper 50 Cent doesn't normally go around topless. Each day when he gets up, this moving target puts on a bullet-proof vest. He goes by the name 50 Cent, but is reportedly insured for $5 million. That figure may well have gone up since his album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin', debuted at No. 1 in the US Billboard charts last week. The CD is designed to look like a target, artistically spattered with gunshots. One of its standout tracks, 'Many Men', choruses: 'Many men/Many many many many men/ Wish death 'pon me'.

The album's release date in the US was brought forward to beat the bootleggers. Few records in recent memory have been more hotly anticipated than this one.

With the global music industry in a state of sharp contraction, the excitement around 50 Cent is doubly heightened: the business badly needs new stars to pull it out of the doldrums. And whatever 50 Cent's skills on the microphone - and they are considerable, his dry, matter-of-fact rhymes displaying a keen wit - his debut is backed by two of the most powerful men in hip hop, Eminem and Dr Dre.

Eminem sang 50 Cent's praises last year, and soon 50 was signed to his Shady Records imprint and Dre's Aftermath stable, raising interest in the Jamaica, Queens native to unprecedented heights. And at the Brit Awards on Thursday, Eminem was seen wearing a 50 Cent T-shirt in his acceptance speeches via video.

If 50 Cent is the biggest news in hip hop, he is also the biggest news in pop music. In recent years, hip hop has become synonymous with pop, as the genre's commercial success has consistently filled charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Through sheer sales volume, and the blanket impact of breakbeats and lyrical flow, the stars of rap - Nelly, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Eminem and Dr Dre - have become some of the most powerful forces the pop world has known. In its first week Get Rich Or Die Tryin' became the fastest-selling debut by any artist in any genre in the US, with more than 872,000 sales; this week, it's up to 1.7 million. And it's not just America. Barring a last-minute post-Brit Awards rally by smooth-cheeked former Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent's album will be declared this week's highest-selling album here, too. When his next single, 'In Da Club', is released on 10 March, he will be inescapable.

50 Cents looks like a thug. That's because he is a thug, or was until quite recently. The convicted crack dealer is due in court again next month to face charges of weapons possession, dating from his arrest on New Year's Eve. He is so scary, Mike Tyson was horrified to discover his daughter was writing fan mail to him.

But 50 Cent is also an artist, and the tale of how this 'Dead Man Walking' (as Q magazine dubbed him) came to be pop's most wanted as well is fascinating and complex. Inevitably, his rise will reignite the moral panic about hip hop and guns, black music and the glorification of violence - kindled not long ago in this country by So Solid Crew - especially if he follows Eminem to the UK in May for live shows. The high-profile success of an artist so nakedly fearsome as 50 Cent throws into relief once again the value hip hop puts on 'the street' and how its posturing blurs the line between fact and fiction.

The language of criminality is common in hip hop - especially since the success in the Nineties of its violent sub-genre, gangsta rap, and its litany of drugs, guns, misogyny and messy ends. But there has always been a delicious tension in hip hop between reality and rhymes, 'keeping it real' and making entertaining pop music, a state of creative, multi-level flux that sophisticated fans are aware of (and appalled critics usually are not). And although a great deal of hip hop traditionally has been made by men escaping a life of crime through wordplay, many rappers are just that: all flow and flair for storytelling, and no exit wounds.

Not 50 Cent. There is a frisson of danger to him that feels more like an earthquake. His recent single, 'Wanksta', was a broadside against fake gangstas made all the more authoritative by his street credentials. This lack of ambiguity, in a market where the old hustlers have bought mansions away from the streets, is what makes him so electrifying. To borrow the language of marketing, 50 Cent's unique selling point is his fearsomeness, how real he is. And how potentially close to death.

'It's critical to his story that he's pushing certain things we've always had a bit further,' says Touré, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and hip-hop aficionado. 'We love the gangsta, the real gangsta, in hip hop. The guy who really lived it.' He laughs as he says 'real'. 'Jay-Z really lived it, Biggie really lived it, we love those guys. He [50] really lived it! He's wearing a bullet-proof vest for real. He's talking about, "I been to jail, a bunch of times. Yeah, I been shot, a bunch of times".'

Or, as the Sun put it, 50 Cent makes Eminem look like Gareth Gates. In 50, the former enfant terrible of hip hop has found an heir more menacing than he ever was. 'His life story sold me,' Eminem told the US hip-hop journal XXL. 'To have a story behind the music is so important. He's just got the total package. He can write songs.' But there is something about 50 Cent as an MC'. On 'Patiently Waiting', one of Get Rich's duets, he is more succinct. He calls 50 Cent 'the realest, the illest, the killest'.

50 Cent's story is a horror story, and at the same time a redemption song, of sorts. When asked what his name means, he has said, 'change'.

Twenty-six-year-old Curtis Jackson's father was largely absent from his childhood; his crack-dealing mother was killed when he was eight. He gradually inherited her business, doing $5,000-worth of business a day, hiding vials of crack in his trainers; he was arrested the day he wore the wrong pair to PE class. And so began a life of detention and recidivism depressingly mundane for its regularity in African-American urban communities. But after a spell in prison in 1994, Jackson decided to try to make it as a rapper. Like boxing, hip hop is a time-honoured escape route from the underworld, followed by luminaries such as Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and even the arch-Svengali Dr Dre.

In 1996, 50 Cent befriended veteran Jam Master Jay, a founding father of hip hop whose Run DMC transmuted the music of the ghetto into the new rock'n'roll in the Eighties, well before gangsta rap's rise. He taught Jackson how to count bars, construct songs. 50 Cent eventually landed a deal with the production outfit TrackMasters and Columbia Records in 1999. The deal was for 250,000and50Centgotanadvanceof250,000 and 50 Cent got an advance of 250,000and50Centgotanadvanceof65,000. He gave 50,000toJay,50,000 to Jay, 50,000toJay,10,000 went on legal expenses, and the remaining $5,000 was spent on crack. This spell recording for Columbia resulted in an album, The Power Of A Dollar, which was much bootlegged but never released.

The best hip hop has considerable humour, a fact rarely grasped by its detractors and the more pedestrian gangsta rappers.

'He makes these little jokes - he's a really funny MC,' says Touré. 'The major gangsta error was deadly seriousness: "I'm gonna kill you, I'm so mad, I can't even keep the skin on my bones!" Over time you got guys that could be deeply funny about it. Jay-Z is really witty about the gangsta experience. So is 50, in the things he says on record, and the things he says in interviews. When he was stabbed, he told the New York Times that it was no big deal, his baby's mother stabbed him worse than that.'

One track that did make it out of the Columbia sessions fuelled the underground notoriety that would eventually make 50 Cent such hot property.

The mischievous underground hit 'How To Rob (An Industry Nigga)' fantasised about relieving many of hip hop and R&B's biggest names - Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, Bobby Brown, Mariah Carey, Will Smith, even Mike Tyson - of their copious riches. 'I'll snatch Kim and tell Puff, "you wanna see her again?/Get your ass down to the nearest ATM",' it needled. Intended to cause maximum uproar, the polemic brought lyrical reprisals from Jay-Z, among others. 'I'm about a dollar/Who the fuck is 50 Cent?' he bristled, and, in so doing, inflated 50 Cent's stock even further.

The song is also said to have earned 50 Cent a beating from the Wu Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah.

He may have begun to make a name for himself, but 50 Cent hadn't exactly made many friends. About the same time, hip-hop megastar Ja Rule was also robbed, reputedly by an acquaintance of 50 Cent's. This incident sparked a still-burning feud with Ja Rule, his label, Murder Inc, and Murder Inc boss Irv Gotti that may have resulted in 50's stabbing in early 2000. Then, one day in May 2000, an unknown gunman pumped nine bullets into Curtis Jackson and left him for dead. It was three days before 50 Cent was due to shoot a video with Destiny's Child for what would have been his major label debut single proper, 'Thug Love'. Soon afterward, as he recovered, Columbia and 50 Cent parted ways.

Undaunted, 50 and his partner, Sha Money, set to work putting out their own mixtapes and bootlegs. Gradually, with his grassroots profile at an all-time high, the talk about rap's newest threat became deafening, and overtures from record labels began in earnest.

The bidding war escalated when Eminem flew 50 Cent out to California and spent an evening excitedly quoting 50's lyrics back at him. Eminem's mentor and the original presence behind gangsta rap, Dr Dre, came on board, and the deal (for a reputed $1million) was done. With it, Eminem and Dre bought themselves the biggest thing since, well, Eminem, cannily neutralising the commercial threat of an even bigger public enemy than Slim Shady by bringing him on side. The money didn't make Curtis Jackson immune to tragedy, though. His mentor Jam Master Jay, a man who shunned violence, was gunned down in his studio last October. The crime remains unsolved, but Jay's friendship with 50 may have made him a target. After Jay's murder, 50 Cent was placed under police protection. More recently, the offices of 50's managers, Violator, were sprayed with bullets. '

If hip hop loves a gangsta, it loves a martyred gangsta even more. Dead rappers sell extremely well. Tupac, in particular, has had at least three successful posthumous albums. It is testament to the adoration that hip-hop's poet laureate garnered in life, but also shows how a bloody end can frame and reframe a body of work. There is a touch of the Tupac about the marketing of 50 Cent, visible in the enthusiasm for his torso - Tupac's 'six-pack' was also often in evidence.

That is not to imply that his record company wishes him dead, although it would be interesting to know how much unreleased work 50 Cent has recorded. But the threat to his life is real, and one he can't do much about except wrap heavy metal around his torso every day. As he puts it on 'Gentlemen': 'If you shoot me, you're famous/If I shoot you, I'm brainless.'

But on Get Rich Or Die Tryin' , in 50 Cent's ascent to fame, there is something of a street opera. The jousting match between the themes of life and death, of mortality and survival, in hip hop is an intricate and mesmerising one - and one that has found an especially absorbing performer in 50 Cent.

· In Da Club will be released on 10 March