You know the rap superstar's story by now. Ex drug dealer, nine gunshot wounds, kind of a scary guy. We thought there had to be more to it than that—and what do you know?
Fiddy Cent: Got rich, didn't die trying
By Allison Samuels
Newsweek
Feb. 21 issue - On a sunny Saturday morning, the buff-and-cut Curtis Jackson—you know him as 50 Cent—has finished his grueling workout in a Beverly Hills gym. Now he's sitting there by a small stereo, eyes closed, head bent, shoulders hunched, swaying back and forth. He likes grooving to music—particularly his own. "This one's the s--t," he says, and opens his eyes. It's a track called "Baltimore Love Thing," from his sophomore album, "The Massacre," which hits stores early next month. It sounds at first like that old-school LL Cool J joint "I Need Love"—until you realize it's not a boy-girl love story, but rather the bond between heroin and a suffering addict. "I'm always coming with something different," he says. "Something no one would ever suspect. Just because people know my story doesn't mean they know me.''
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By now everybody knows the outlines of 50's do-rags-to-riches story: 28 years old, ex drug dealer from Queens, shot nine times, a debut rap album that was the runaway hit of 2002. His fights. His feud with fellow rapper Ja Rule (even Louis Farrakhan tried to make peace between them, but no luck). His onstage intrusion at last year's Grammys when Evanesence got the award he thought he'd deserved ("I was just a little heated"). And his brief romance with actress Vivica A. Fox, nearly 12 years his senior ("I like older women 'cause I don't want to have to teach nobody s--t"). "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " sold more than 11 million copies, becoming rap's best-selling debut album, thanks to its mix of head-banging anthems, sexy tracks for the ladies and, of course, the Dr. Dre-produced single "In Da Club." Last year the onetime street-corner kid took home an estimated $50 million—after taxes, according to sources.
"The Massacre'' follows the blueprint of "Get Rich." More tales of inner-city lust, violence and revenge—"When the Guns Come Out," "Somebody's Going to Die Tonight"—in 50's trademark East Coast flow, a dry, understated singsong. "You know, that's the first thing they want to say about a rapper when he makes a lot of paper,'' 50 says. " 'He's rich now—what's he going to talk about?' Well, I was poor for much longer than I been rich, so what you think I'm going still talk about? The two years I had money or the twentysomething years I didn't?" The money has dulled neither 50's hungry perfectionism—he scrapped the first version of "The Massacre'' last year and started over—nor his street sensibility. But even at his hardest, there's a somber resignation and self-consciousness about 50 Cent that lends intelligence, even a spiritual maturity, to the usual gangsta pose. "Many men wish death on me," he rapped on his debut album, "Lawd, I don't cry no more/don't look to the sky no more/have mercy on me, have mercy on my soul/somewhere my heart turned cold.''
And anyone who listened closely could hear another story between the lines: "I'm into havin' sex, ain't into makin' love," he rapped in "In Da Club," "so come give me a hug." A hug? On that first album, he betrayed this sheepishly innocent, even kidlike, side of himself most clearly in "21 Questions"—a song Dre didn't want on the record. "I love you like a fat kid loves cake/ To make you happy I'll do whatever it takes.'' "Dre was, like, 'How you goin' to be gangsta this and that and then put this sappy love song on?' " 50 recalls. "But I told him, 'I'm two people. I've always had to be two people since I was a kid, to get by. To me that's not diversity, it's necessity'.'' If you want to get to know 50 Cent—both 50 Cents—his childhood is the place to start.
He doesn't remember much about his mother. She was one of the few female drug dealers in Jamaica, Queens—back then, at least—she died at 23, in a mysterious fire, and his grandparents took in the 8-year-old Curtis. "I just remember things were better financially when my mom was alive," says 50, "and sometimes thinking if she was here things would be different. She wasn't home much. I guess what I really remember is that she was very aggressive, you know? She had to be to play in a man's world.'' Curtis's grandmother understandably doted on him. "You know, my grandmother had nine kids," he says, "and my mother is the only one dead.''
He picked up both his mother's expensive tastes and her street smarts. "I had gotten used to a certain style of living with Mom hustling," he recalls. "I got everything I wanted. I knew my grandmother couldn't afford to buy me Air Jordans, and I didn't want to even bother her with that. So I started hustling to buy things. I'd tell her whatever I had new was my friend's stuff across the street. That's how I became two people—one was the hard-core drug dealer in the day and the other was my grandmother's baby by night.'' He was soon a neighborhood legend. "Yeah, if you lived around our way you'd heard of 50,'' rapper and protege Lloyd Banks recalls. "I was in the street a lot, and we would always hook up. He had a lot of knowledge about things and wouldn't mind sharing with you—just like now. He always handled his business and came out on top.''
He also acquired a pretty long rap sheet. Between stints in jail, he finished his GED, had a son and began to focus on moving into rap. As a kid, he'd been impressed by the witty political rhymes of KRS-ONE, and a chance meeting with the late Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC helped him learn to count bars and structure songs. Soon the producing duo Trackmasters heard the buzz on the young rapper from Queens; in 1999, they got him a deal at Columbia Records. In just two weeks, he'd written 36 songs, including the underground biting classic "How to Rob.'' But before an album could be released, 50's day job came back to haunt him. "I was sitting in the car in front of my grandmother's house," he remembers, "and the shots just rang out. My grandmother was outside in the front yard, my son was in the house. It was nuts. Let's just say my grandmother figured it all out right then.''
