Yayo-Ghostface Didn't Write Supreme Clientele

The Spin Interview: 50 Cent (Bigger, Longer, and Uncut)

By: Charles Aaron

July 6, 2007

Thanks to Don Imus, hip-hop is now under a new microscope. But 50 Cent offers no apologies. With bonus content!

50 Cent / Photo by Dan Winters

What follows is an unabridged version of the story that appears in our July issue.

For the moment, 50 Cent is preaching to the choir. While a gaggle of assistants and security personnel lounge around a Manhattan recording studio, their multiplatinum benefactor discourses on how violent films like Scarface and GoodFellas have a greater potential negative impact on kids than hip-hop does. "That's right, uh-huh," echoes G Unit capo Tony Yayo, like a grumpy, possibly armed Ed McMahon.

Then, suddenly, 50 walks over, puts his face an inch away from mine and says, "Ask me if I'm a role model?"

Are you?

"No, but I'm inspiring to people." He grins and turns away, inscrutable point apparently made.

With the delayed September release of his third album, Curtis, the rapper born Curtis Jackson on July 6, 1975, in South Jamaica, Queens, is desperately hoping to inspire a downloading public that is purchasing far less music than when he released his first two albums -- 2003's Get Rich or Die Tryin' and 2005's The Massacre, which sold almost 20 million copies combined. Curtis' first two singles ("Straight to the Bank," "Amusement Park") have yet to become the soundtrack of the summer. His acting career, though busy of late -- the war drama Home of the Brave with Samuel L. Jackson, prison-boxing flick The Dance with Nicolas Cage, and drag-racing vehicle Live Bet -- has met with critical yawns. And even though the G Unit empire (a stable of rappers, a clothing line, shoe deal, books, video game, a recently sold stake in VitaminWater) earned $41 million from June 2005 to June 2006, 50 knows that if he wants to remain "rap's MVP," as he boasted on the hit single "Hate It or Love It," he has to stay as edgily focused as ever.

You're 32 now, and as you get further away from life on the street, does it get harder to reconcile who you are on record with who you are in real life? On the new album, you still rap about cooking crack and shooting people, but you've been living in a mansion in Connecticut.
Your experience is your life; the things you go through make you who you are. So I've spent four years being what people call "successful," and all the rest of my life not having it. And maybe because of that, the painful moments are more visible in my memory. If I'm writing about the environment I grew up in, then guns are gonna be goin' off. Now they haven't gone off around me in real life as much as they have in my music because I haven't been able to capture real life perfectly in my music. A lot of my songs are like a record that's skipping. I've been repeating these scenarios until I do them perfectly.

That gunshot sound has been going off on your records since well before Get Rich or Die Tryin'.
That's what I hear when I think of where I grew up. And it also comes from the experience of me being shot. It's weird -- people associate me with gun violence, when I was the one who got shot. I haven't ever shot anybody.

But everybody thinks you have.
Why?

Well, you've said so in interviews, both directly and indirectly, and you rap about it all the time.
That's an assumption; there's no proof I've ever shot anybody. What I think scares people about me is that I was shot nine times, and I'm okay with that. I accepted it and moved on, and it didn't slow me down. Being shot wasn't the most painful experience for me, anyway. The most painful experience was not knowing what I was going to do with my life after my record company didn't accept my phone calls anymore [Columbia dropped 50 in 1999 after the shooting].

That must have been devastating. You made this amazing record [Power of a Dollar] and you're excited to put it out, and then you're in the hospital and the album's shelved.
It was terrible. I was mad. I was scared.

And since you were shot in the mouth, you didn't know if you were gonna be able to rap again.
My voice was completely different. I had my teeth knocked out of the whole side of my mouth, and my tongue got bullet fragments in it. But it's funny -- this is the voice that everyone enjoys now. It's made me think that maybe it was God's plan, maybe I was supposed to be shot, because after that, I signed a publishing deal [with EMI] on my hospital bed. They gave me a $100,000 advance. But then they dropped me because they didn't realize I'd been shot in the face and might not physically be able to perform. They used it as a tax write-off, but I lived off that $100,000 during the time period when I was hurt and couldn't do music and provide for myself.

Did you have to completely rethink the way you rapped because of the injury? Before, your voice had more eagerness and intensity to it.
Everything changed. My mind frame changed. When all those things happened, the fun went out of my music.

When you recorded the songs for Power of a Dollar, were you convinced you were going to make it big?
I felt like I was ready in 1997 when I was writing music with Jam Master Jay. But I was so far from being ready. In '99, I put out "How to Rob" [the barbed single in which 50 threatens to clean out "industry ," from Diddy to DMX to Wu-Tang to Timbaland) because Columbia wasn't understanding what I was trying to do creatively, and it just took off. It was almost taboo to mention names on a record after Tupac and Biggie got shot; nobody wanted that type of friction.

It was controversial, but it was also funny. Rappers aren't known for having a good sense of humor about themselves, though. What did you expect would happen?
I knew people would misinterpret it, and they did. But for me, there was no Plan B. I absolutely had to be a success in music. The only thing positive in my life was music, so I said what I needed to say. I mean, the lyric on the record is: "This ain't serious / Being broke will make you delirious." So if somebody wants to take it seriously, then they just want to misinterpret it, or they're just really ' stupid.

There were several times on Power of a Dollar when you stepped back and said that you weren't serious.
I don't do that anymore because the intention has changed. When I was in the early phase of my career, I was at a desperate point. My entire company had no idea who I was, and that was me trying to make them understand, but they just didn't get it. But what they provided for me was a functioning record company that I could learn from. I'd get up every morning and go to Columbia like I had to go to work. I'd go see my product manager and learn what his responsibilities were. I'd go hang out in the street department and see how they did mix-show radio, and then learn the responsibilities of the A&R [team]. I'd be up with the art director, watching what he did. I was the intern who couldn't get sent to the store for coffee. [Laughs] They gave me the information that was necessary for me to know what to do when they dropped me.

You've said that the new album, Curtis, is partly about you going back and exploring how you felt before you were even known as 50 Cent, when you were a little kid.
I wrote and recorded lyrics for this album at my grandmother's house again. I went back in the basement, where you have to bend down the ceiling is so low, where I wrote Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Being in that environment helped me remember things. I had to dig deeper. I'm not actually in that lifestyle; it's not surrounding me as much as it did prior to Get Rich.

What is it about that time that you are trying to capture?
Those points where I was more vulnerable. After I've been a success, there hasn't been that much vulnerability for me.

What kinds of vulnerabilities?
Well, when I was younger, I experienced being beaten up. You know, that's actually what brings out the aggression I have now. When I was ten years old, my mom had already passed, and I'd get into physical altercations. I'd get jumped. To me, after my mom passed, everything, literally, that went wrong, went wrong because she wasn't there. If I wanted to go to the park, and it would start drizzling, it was happening because my mom wasn't there -- because everything good came from her.

But she was a drug dealer?
Like I say on the record, "My mom told her baby boy the Lord was gonna bless us / Then dope bought us the that food stamps wouldn't get us / And they don't understand we were just trying to make it / But where I'm from when you want you gotta take it." Only a child would think that the Lord's blessing would be dope. The innocence of that line is the significance in it. My mom hustled, so everything I experienced having that was nice came from her making that decision. She didn't she see welfare or Burger King as a real option. She did what she thought she had to do to take care of me.

You haven't ever really written about your own family -- your son, Marquise, or his mother.
You know why I wouldn't do it? Because it would be hard for me to make reference to her without being disrespectful. [50 has been feuding in court over child support with Marquise's mom, Shaniqua Tompkins.] Say, if my mom was using drugs, I would probably lose respect for her. But if someone else was disrespectful to her, I would respond immediately. And my son has so many of my qualities that I feel like he would feel the same way, even if it was his father saying it. He would find some resentment toward me for saying something bad about his mother, so I don't talk about it.

That's much different than how Eminem has handled it.
I got no comment on that. But also, my son's mom had a daughter before me, and I've never really talked about her because I wanted to allow her to have a relationship with her dad. She's gone down South to see her father on vacation in the summer, and I'll call and ask her if she's having fun, and she'll say, "No, not really." And I'll say, "Why?" and she'll say, "Because he's cheap." And that really bothered me because he's not cheap; he's not cheap at all. He just doesn't have what I have. And that's, like, damn, I can remember being where he is.

It seems like there's more difference between Curtis Jackson and 50 Cent than you let on.
50 Cent is the aggressive portion of Curtis, and because of the musical content, there's a perception that I'm darker than I am. That's why I enjoy film projects, because they allow me to show emotions that I don't normally show through my music. Hip-hop is such a competitive art form, so anything you put out that makes you vulnerable, puts you in danger, because other people are gonna use those statements and things against you, to discredit you later.

How does it feel to release your record in this post

[QUOTE]But can't he just make a great record, even if it doesn't sell, and we can appreciate it as listeners, as hip-hop fans?
-No, because a great record is embraced and enjoyed by the public. And it's played in cars and clubs.[/QUOTE]
SLAP

And for the record Ghost's dinner plate medallion >>>> Yayo's career

Well Ghostface still means alot to me and Ghostface is well respected where I come from because he actually comes thru from time to time.

good post willie nteresting

I was reading this again when I realized something. Ghost might have made it for himself but he still sold more than Yayo. Whats that say about you Yayo?