The (actually quite literal) death of G-Unit

It's only funny until someone's weed carrier turns up dead. Then it's only 3/4ths as funny as it had been.

When Tony Yayo was accused of slapping Jimmy Henchmen's son, probably going on three years ago now, I thought it was the most hilarious publicity stunt evar. Fiddy Cent's album Curtis was set to hit stores, before it ended up getting pushed back to September, the same day Kanye West released Graduation (in retrospect, not the best idea in the world), because no one liked the singles. Even if Henchmen's son getting slapped didn't have anything to do with Curtis (like, if Tony Yayo just so happened to see the kid walking down the street and figured he'd slap him), it resulted in a lot more press than Fiddy had been getting for his music.

If Fiddy would have capitalized on it and released Curtis then, he might have been better off than trying to compete with Kanye. Similarly, you wonder why he didn't just release Before I Self Destruct during the height of his beef with Rick Ross. I'm pretty sure I read, in one of those MTV News stories re: this year's hottest MCs list that the reason Before I Self Destruct keeps getting pushed back is because Fiddy's still trying to write a song people like. The TIs might force him to put it out before the end of the holiday season regardless. I've heard Interscope is sinking a lot of money into cross-promoting it and Eminem's Relapse 2.

When word got out that Tony Yayo had slapped Jimmy Henchmen's son, he was very adamant that he hadn't. I've hardly ever seen someone so adamant about something. It was like in college, when a white guy would be accused of having sex with a fat woman. (Of course, when a black guy has sex with a fat white woman, he wants the whole world to know.) Tony Yayo has been in and out of jail since he was a kid, in the 1960s, and he raps about all kinds of illegal shit, but slapping kids is clearly where he draws a line. Maybe because I'm not as familiar with the code of the street (which usually seems pretty random and arbitrary to me) I didn't realize why Tony Yayo would be so adamant that he didn't slap Jimmy Henchmen's son. He probably knew someone would eventually end up dead behind this.

(Now seems like as good a time as any to point out that, upon further reflection, slapping a 15 year-old child doesn't seem funny to me at all.)

It makes you wonder if Tony Yayo really did slap that kid, and this guy Lodi Mack, who turned up dead the other day, took the rap for it. I read just now, in the news item on this site re: the death of Lodi Mack, that Mack basically got away with it. He got sentenced to nine months behind bars, but he ended up serving it concurrently with two years he was already serving, for some other shit he'd done. I'm not gonna sit here and claim to know what happened the day that poor child got slapped, but it would have been very convenient, if they were able to take that offense and lump it in with some other offense, rendering it essentially unpunished. And if this Lodi Mack was gonna plead guilty to some shit like that, jail was probably the best place for him to be anyway. He didn't last two weeks, once he got out. If only he would have taken the rap for a few more crimes, he could have stayed in the joint for a few more years, and maybe this would have blown over.

Meanwhile, speaking of Jimmy Henchmen, G-Unit, Aftermath, so on and so forth, I see the Game is back with Dr. Dre now. There was a picture the other day on Twitter of the Game in the studio with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, supposedly working on a song for Detox. As the Game himself put it: "WE BOUT 2 MAKE ALOT OF PEOPLE MAD. RIDE WIT US OR GET RAN OVER ! AFTERMATH OR DIE !" Oh, word? Does this mean the Game will be back working with Dre for the Red Album as well? Whatever is going on, it can't be good for Fiddy. First his weed carrier's weed carrier turned up dead, and now the Game is back in Dre's good graces. Dre can't be working with both Game and Fiddy, can he? Especially now that blood has been spilled. This looks to me like Dre took a look at the state of both of their careers and decided to side with Game, not unlike when he dropped Game in favor of Fiddy, a few years ago. My, how the tables have turned.