50 Cent, No. 1 With a Bullet

When 50 Cent smiles, his eyes narrow into tight little slits. For a guy who has been shot nine times, who began selling crack when he was twelve, who was allegedly stabbed during a recording-studio scuffle with Ja Rule's posse and who typically poses for the covers of his bootleg CDs holding some manner of firearm, 50 Cent smiles with a disarming frequency. 50 Cent smiles while talking about his own shooting. He smiles after describing the murder of his mother, when he was eight years old. When he says, "I know if I ever ran into someone's house during a robbery, I'm not leaving no one in that house to be a witness for me, I'll kill everybody in that motherf-cker before I go," he is smiling. He speaks in a low, gentle voice, and there's a dimple on the edge of his left cheek. Which, upon closer examination, you realize is a bullet wound.

Queens rapper is the "realist"
In the spring of 2000, after retrieving some jewelry from his grandmother's house in the Jamaica section of Queens, New York, 50 Cent was shot in the face, hand and legs by a man with a 9 mm pistol. "He was as close as I am to you," 50 Cent says. We're sitting across from each other at a narrow conference table in the office of his management company, in Manhattan's Flatiron district. 50 Cent tugs down his lower lip and leans forward to display the spot where the bullet lodged in his lower gum. There's still a gaping wound where several of his rear teeth should reside.

"Kid dead, though, who shot me," 50 Cent mentions. He's smiling. I ask whether 50 Cent knows why he was shot in the first place. "When you make a decision to change your life, everybody around you doesn't decide at the same time," he says. The year before the shooting, 50 Cent had signed a deal with Columbia Records and was slowly extricating himself from the crack trade. "And the things you do come back. I shot people before. I ain't gonna tell you who." His smile shifts now, from bemused to more philosophical. "So, yeah, it is, what goes around comes around."

50 Cent was the subject of a record-label bidding war last year. He'd released a series of bootlegs -- generally murder ballads larded with more gun jargon than a National Rifle Association convention -- that showcased his smooth delivery over hook-laden, unauthorized samples.The twenty-seven-year-old eventually signed with Eminem's Shady/ Aftermath label, reportedly for $1 million. His first single for Em, the catchy "Wanksta," appeared on the 8 Mile soundtrack and quickly became a hip-hop radio staple, and his full-length, Get Rich or Die Trying, due out in February, features the party song "In Da Club," driven by a loping, ominous beat courtesy of Dr. Dre. 50's witty boasts are an obvious fit with Eminem. "This rap sh-t is so easy, I'm gettin' what you get for a brick to talk greazy," 50 Cent raps on "Wanksta," while on the bootleg track "8 More Miles" he ends an extended metaphor (himself as a drug) with the lines, "Wall Street niggas/ They cop me on the low/White boys don't call me coke/They call me blow." Still, with so much potential profit on the line, it's impossible to ignore the fact that 50's thug life is being exploited in order to sell him as the rapper who keeps it realest.

As he talks, 50 Cent folds and unfolds a four-inch pocketknife, occasionally using it to poke at the battery cover of his Motorola pager, which has been taped shut. He sports the standard-issue bling: cross, watch, stud earring, all enormous and diamond-encrusted. Tattoos drape both arms, and a gray NBA cap is pulled low over his small ears. He looks, when he enters the room, almost freakishly built, like a cartoon superhero, his chest protruding from his baggy white hip-hop T-shirt. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear he's wearing a bulletproof vest. "Oh, yeah, I put it on right after my underwear," 50 Cent says, yanking up his shirt to reveal a black padded vest. His three-man security detail and the members of his G-Unit crew, the rappers Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo, also wear vests, as does a guy whose sole purpose seems to involve holding onto a locked briefcase that belongs to 50 Cent. (There are many possible ways to feel awkward in an interview situation, but being the only person present not wearing a bulletproof vest may be the least desirable.)

50 Cent first received widespread press coverage in November, when police questioned him in the days following the slaying of Run-DMC DJ Jam Master Jay. 50 Cent has also been involved in a long-running feud with Ja Rule and his label, Murder Inc. He says that Ja is the inspiration for "Wanksta." According to 50 Cent, the beef started when Ja was robbed by an acquaintance of 50 Cent's from the neighborhood. "Put it like this, if you grew up where I grew up, you gonna know people who rob people," 50 Cent says. He shrugs. "He's pop. What makes him envy me is, I can sell records the way he would like to sell records. People don't wanna hear that story from him. He jumping around on TV too long in the rain with Mary J. Blige." Neither Ja Rule nor his record company would comment for this story.

Born Curtis Jackson, 50 Cent never knew his dad. His mother, Sabrina, sold drugs until her murder, after which 50 Cent moved in with his grandmother and soon began dealing himself. "The older dudes, they'd already seen me from when I was so big," he recalls, "so it was, 'Oh, that Sabrina's boy. He ain't gonna tell no one. He was raised doing this sh-t.' "

50 Cent's first arrest went down at his high school. He would hide crack vials in his sneakers, and he accidentally brought the wrong pair to school for gym class. Still, he rose in stature on the streets, eventually running an operation that grossed $5,000 a day, he says. "But I was going back and forth to jail. So when the opportunity came with the music, I wanted to try it."

That opportunity came when 50 Cent met Jam Master Jay in 1996. 50 Cent had been rapping for fun, at parties and on the streets, just like most of his friends. He talked Jay, who had a studio and record label, into letting him make an audition tape. "The music thing was a positive move, and I felt like that's the way it was going," 50 Cent says. "Everybody who sold drugs in my hood, the older people, all in the music business now. If they're not in the business, they're protecting somebody in the business. People wanna portray things they haven't lived. If you gonna run around and say you a murderer, and you don't kill nobody, you need a killer in your vicinity." 50 Cent also had a natural talent for turning his bio into compelling three-minute narratives. His rhyming skills eventually caught the attention of Columbia Records. In 1999, 50 Cent signed a deal with the label for $250,000, receiving a $65,000 advance; $50,000 went to Jay, $10,000 to an attorney.

And what, one wonders, did 50 Cent buy with the $5,000 left?

"Crack. Crack. I bought crack cocaine with it. How else you gonna provide for yourself? I did thirty-six songs in eighteen days for Columbia. Then I had eight months go by with no work going on." Growing increasingly impatient with the glacial speed of a record-label bureaucracy, 50 Cent decided to record a single that would gain him instant attention. In the summer of 1999, he released "How To Rob," which describes, in hilarious, often mocking detail, the various ways in which he planned to jack the hottest hip-hop and R&B stars of the time, from Mariah Carey to Jay-Z. "When robbery's not out of the question, it's kinda easy for a song like that to fall into your thought pattern," 50 Cent says. "Bigger artists have bigger diamonds. Kids in the hood is looking at the TV, going, 'Damn it, look at that sh-t he got on!' Rappers have egos, so I was anticipating them being upset. But I didn't care, 'cause it had been a year since the deal with Columbia, and I'm still selling crack." The song was a hit, but complaints from several of the lampooned artists made Columbia nervous. After his shooting, the label happily released him from his contract, so 50 Cent began selling his own music straight to bootleggers. A CD made its way to Eminem, who, on a Los Angeles radio show, declared 50 Cent his favorite rapper.

50 Cent unabashedly believes in fate, that he survived his shooting for a reason. "With some artists, people look at them and wanna be that artist," he says. "I don't think people wanna be me. I'm still searching for my purpose. I do have defects of character. When I get mad, I get mad. I can do things and say things that" -- he pauses and smiles -- "aren't nice. And people, they look at me and they go, 'Well, he's crazy.' " Another pause. Then: "Is crazy bad? Me being crazy is . . ." 50 Cent shrugs. "I'm all right with that."

MARK BINELLI
(January 15, 2003)

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