Has-Lo is not a Boy Scout; he’ll air your ass out.
50 Cent is too successful. No one wants to champion that.
People love the chase. The come up is the mirror to the chase. When the listener can live vicariously through your chase, the listener is excited like young love. When the artist achieves the success, the listener doesn’t relate to them anymore — it was always vicarious. The listener wasn’t ever a part of it.
So now 50 Cent is a success, and he isn’t doing anything for the listener. It’s wild. We are bored by his success. We are bored by it and offended by it because we resent what we don’t have and/or believe we can achieve.
He’s not throwing it in anyone’s face more than he ever did in 2007. He’s the same Fif — the funny asshole, the shit talker, the goon, the leader.
This new video for “Hustler” got over 280,000 views in one day. No major label backing it. No radio play. And no one cares. That’s a HUGE achievement for anyone else, but because it’s Curtis Jackson, it barely moves the needle.
Get Rich or Die Tryin was the new millenium’s answer to Doggystyle — an album you can rock an entire party with just be pressing play on track one and walking away for an hour. Animal Ambition, based on the singles he’s dropped, could be his best album in at least seven years. These singles have me excited to buy a 50 Cent record. And I don’t feel like alot of people feel that way.
Do people love 50 Cent or Interscope?
50 operates off a modified version of 48 Laws of Power. There was no way on earth he could have continued to exist in that system. He broke his own set of rules. He’s an alpha male who wants to lead.
He wants to be in charge. He wants to set the pace. He starts his own headphone company, he has his own branding, label, products, etc. He is now outshining the king(s) — Iovine, Dre, Eminem, take your pick. One of the basic and most well-known Laws of Power is that if you outshine the master, you get shut down.
Law # 11: “Keep people dependent on you.” 50 cent hasn’t needed Jimmy Iovine in YEARS. He’s broken so many of these laws because there was no way for him to reach critical mass without doing it. 50 has been touching Jimmy Iovine’s chain for quite some time. At some point he didn’t view himself as a servant to Jimmy anymore. But Jimmy still has a LOT of power – he will drum you out of the business.
Law #7: “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit!” This one’s only partially true. He has used a lot of his own money to push his causes forward, but his company admittedly had interscope’s overhead funding part of the operation. It was ALWAYS about 50 and his brand. Iovine and Dre are thinking “You use my company and don’t attach my brand, Beats By Dre, and you start your own brand?!” Nah, son. Eight singles flop.
Law 46: “Never appear too perfect! — Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity!” This was 50’s problem. Things went too perfectly in his career, too by-the-numbers. People got disinterested. It’s not easy to control your emotions and ambitions in order to be this calculating.
Now, 50 Cent is diversifying his bonds. Headphones. Websites. A new TV show. A video for every song off his new album. And the music is everything we loved about him ten years ago. He can’t be anything but successful. Can we still enjoy his success though? I don’t know. I just enjoy these new songs.
