Pro: 50 eschews recent pop-music flirtations and returns to roots as a gangster rapper.
Con: Minimalist album (no big guests outside of Shady/Aftermath and first single "Baby By Me") highlights 50's flaws as a rapper.
Bottom Line: 50 hasn't been relevant since "I Get Money"; B4ISD won't change that.
Recommended Tracks:
Psycho
OK, You're Right
50 Cent tries to reconnect with his gangster rap roots on his new album Before I Self Destruct. Besides a few Dre tracks and the lead single "Baby By Me", the album has a consistent and monotonous sound -- harshly melodic beats with hard pianos and drums behind them. With no other guest rappers besides Eminem, the album rests entirely on 50's shoulders.
Such a bright spotlight does him no favors. He rarely switches up his flow, mostly sticking with the same gravelly sing-song rhyme scheme that sounds like he's talking out of one side of his mouth. And he's certainly not the cleverest lyricist, using lazy metaphors like "I've got more guns than a gun store" and "I'm like Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness; in my hood we hustle in pursuit of the same shit." Eminem out-raps him so badly on "Psycho" it's embarrassing.
B4ISD is a full-throated return to the hardcore lyrics of his underground years: "You want some, come get some / It's murder one when you see my gun / I just squeeze and squeeze till the whole clip done / You just bleed and bleed until the police come." That's the most surprising part of the album -- 50 has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past seven years, yet he doesn't sound very happy.
The only reason girls sleep with him is to "have a baby by me and be a millionaire." Even his usually witty one-liners are tinged with bitterness -- banished G-Unit members Young Buck and Game are a "junkie" and a "queer" respectively. The scars from a messy custody battle with the mother of his son are still fresh: "She don't care about me, she just wants some cash / I'm thinking damn girl we used to be friends."
Anytime he shows any vulnerability, he quickly scrambles back to the psychological safety of the gangster pose. He mentions the pain he felt when his mother blamed him for the missing furniture of his crack-head uncle stole, then immediately boasts "he pistol-whipped that (expletive) till his face was purple" to retaliate.
As "Psycho" shows, a rapper as talented as Eminem and a producer as talented as Dre can make great music about nothing, but 50 doesn't have nearly the skill of his mentors. He spends most of B4ISD trying to scare us, when it really sounds like he just needs a hug.
Pros: 50 & co. haven't lost confidence and swagger of their underground days.
Cons: Decision to only use cheap producers backfires spectacularly. Bottom Line: Every one associated with album -- 50, Banks, Yayo, producers -- disappoints.
Recommended Tracks:
Rider Part 2
An underground smash in 1999, “How to Rob” introduced the world to 50 Cent. It humorously described robbing rap’s biggest stars, mocking the disconnect between their lyrics and their lifestyle: “You better recognize, I’m straight from the street / these industry cats starting to look like something to eat / What Jigga just sold, like 4 mil? He got something to live for / don’t want no one putting four through that Bentley door.”
Authenticity became 50’s main calling card. You could trust what he said; he had nine bullet holes to prove it. His debut Get Rich or Die Tryin perfected this formula, mixing glitzy beats and catchy hooks with super-aggressive, violent lyrics.
G-Unit, his rap crew, soon followed - Lloyd Banks, the lyricist/ladies-man, Young Buck, the raw Southerner, and Tony Yayo, the hype-man. Their debut Beg for Mercy went multi-platinum, and it seemed 50 could do no wrong.
But success was a double-edged sword. He left behind his musical roots, while his music never changed. The end-result was 2007’s Curtis, a stale reprise of his debut and his first commercial failure. G-Unit’s new album Terminate on Sight sticks to the same out-of-date blueprint.
He learned the wrong lesson from “I Get Money,” the only honest moment on Curtis. Since it was produced by a relative nobody, he figured T.O.S. wouldn’t need any big-name producers or collaborators either. Eminem and Dre are nowhere to be found, and their presence is sorely missed. The album has almost no memorable beats or melodies.
50 has always used beef for publicity — from “How to Rob” to last-year’s “showdown” with Kanye. This time around, he excommunicated Young Buck, easily the group’s second most accomplished rapper, for disloyalty. But not only are Buck’s four verses some of the album’s best, the whole situation is eerily similar to Game’s banishment in 2005.
That’s the album’s fundamental problem — we’ve heard it all before. 50 is a gangster with a heart of gold. Lloyd Banks, dubbed the Punch line King, is reduced to a dispenser of bland similes: “Drink like an uncle, smoke like a Rasta / ball like a superstar, tough like a boxer.” And the less said about Tony Yayo’s rapping the better.
In reality, 50 can’t be a gangster anymore - he’s worth nine figures. Somewhere a hungry rapper is thinking he might be something to eat.
Pros: New minimalist sound keeps album sounding fresh.
Cons: His self-absorption and egotism are becoming increasingly hard to take. Bottom Line: Graduation makes strong case for album of the year.
Recommended Tracks:
Good Life Everything I Am
Album: 50 Cent Curtis
Rating: 3/5 stars
Pros: Consistent album with very few misses.
Cons: Uninspired work breaks no new ground lyrically or musically.
Bottom Line: How many times can 50 remake Get Rich or Die Tryin?
Recommended Tracks:
I Get Money
Ayo Technology
The Kanye West/50 Cent showdown is finally here. From the Rolling Stone cover to 50's conditional retirement (if Kanye outsold him) announcement, the rappers have masterfully hyped today's releases of Graduation and Curtis for months.
But they face a challenge bigger than outselling each other. Not only are they being counted on to reverse rap's nosedive on the charts (2006 saw a 21 percent drop in album sales), but also to breathe new life into a genre that Nas famously declared "dead" a year ago.
And although they reside on opposite sides of the hip-hop spectrum, their rise to the top is similar. As gangsta rap exploded in popularity in the '90s, it no longer became enough to deal drugs on wax; to rap required a rap sheet. The entire industry became obsessed with keeping it as real as possible — with 50 and his nine bullet holes the logical conclusion. Less than a year later, Kanye rose to super-stardom by flipping "realness" on its head — reveling in his insecurities and not-so-subtly positioning himself as the antidote to 50's macho posturing.
"Realness" was the selling point for their groundbreaking debuts — Kanye's College Dropout and 50's Get Rich or Die Tryin. Two albums later, they're no longer lovable underdogs, but international mega-stars. Fame has dramatically altered their lives, how would it affect their music?
Curtis high point is the aptly titled I Get Money. Over a blistering beat that combines a retro '80s rap sample with menacing synthesizers, he reminds us that: "I take quarter water and sold it in bottles for two bucks / then Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions, what the f*ck?"
An earlier single is even more explicit, as 50 and Tony Yayo laugh Straight to the Bank: "I ain't even got to rap now, life is made / Said I ain't even got to rap, I'm filthy made." OK, he's rich, now what? It's a question Curtis never really answers.
Lyrically, he hasn't progressed at all, recycling the same themes from his first two albums. He's either a killer still walking the streets (see: My Gun, Man Down, I'll Still Kill) or a thug with a soft side (see: duets with Mary J. Blige and Robin Thicke). Things bottom out with the failed first single Amusement Park, a remake of the already heavily recycled Candy Shop.
But songwriting, not lyricism, made 50 who he is. That's Curtis’sbiggest surprise — there aren't many hits. Before The Massacre was released, he had four songs in the Billboard Top 10; only Ayo Technology is likely to make much such noise on the charts. And that has more to do with the Timberlake/Timbaland tandem than 50's superfluous verses.
The production, farmed out to a roster of no-names, is functional — the melodies won't stick in your head, but they'll keep it nodding. Curtis, essentially a less-inspired remake of Get Rich, is an unrepentant New York gangsta rap album. It should satisfy his fans, but even a salesman as good as 50 can't resell the same product forever.
While 50 steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that his life has changed ("I ain't fresh out the hood / I'm still in the hood"), Kanye can't stop talking about it. Graduation is his most personal album yet, in the sense that Kanye West is the only real subject.
The social commentary of his earlier works is markedly absent: "Say goodbye to the NAACP award / I'd rather get the 'I got a lot of cheese' award." Whether he's rubbing his success in his doubter's faces (Can't Tell Me Nothing) or exulting in the Good Life with T-Pain, Graduation is a defiant celebration of his career.
Kanye has never been afraid to take risks musically, and Graduation is no exception. While many songs are still rooted in familiar samples (Michael Jackson on Good Life, Daft Punk on Stronger), he opts for a minimalist approach around them — light synthesizers, airy drums and soulful piano chords — instead of the grand hip-hop orchestrations of Late Registration. The result is a futuristic sound that, befitting the album’s celebratory feel, is almost impossibly cheerful.
This accentuates Kanye the MC, for better or worse. More than ever, he sounds like a star: charismatic enough to remain likeable as he delivers increasingly absurd raps: "I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven / When I awoke I spent that on a necklace / I told God I'd be back in a second / I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny / And what I do? Act more stupidly." Yet his technical skills are still barely passable — flowing like an older roller-coaster picking up speed as it barrels downhill, just barely staying on top of the beat and the edge of disaster.
50 and Kanye aren't just rappers anymore; they're celebrities. Ignore that celebrity in your raps too much and you become a self-parody (Snoop Dogg), but embrace its insanity too fully and you become an uninteresting bore (see Eminem's appearance on 50's Peep Show). At times in their third albums, both fail to manage that balancing act.
If they want to stay relevant, they had better learn how.
