For the second installment of XXL's Get Rich of Die Tryin week, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of 50 Cent's monumental debut, we look back at an extensive narrative penned by writer Kris Ex on 50's imminent return to the rap game, right before his blockbuster debut which was cosigned by Eminem and Dr. Dre. Check out 50's story before the Vitamin Water and headphone deal.

Words: Kris Ex

He’s hustled, been shot, stabbed, crippled and hated on by various rappers. Got dropped from his label, then disappeared from the game without a trace. Sorry shook ones. 50 Cent is back to break his silence and keep it gangsta.

His pendant—a platinum cross, embedded with hefty diamonds--clinks against his bulletproof vest every time he moves, which he does often. He’s an expert raconteur: his sizable, sculpted arms—adorned with elaborate curlicued tattoos—wave in the air. He breaks his sentences into punchlines, adding a smile, a “ya feel me?” or a grimace to bring his point home. “I ain’t never bit my tongue,” he says. Pause. “Once, by accident.” Smile. The rubber-gripped semi-automatic handgun never leaves his waist. Well, only once, to show the bullet wounds on his legs.

His stories spill like liquid. He’ll trace a line from the ramifications of his infamous single (more on that later), to rappers using the “tools of engrossment” (“In they music, everyone expands things.”), to Jadakiss (“He’s a hot nigga”), to touring with Nas (“The only nigga that did something for me without expecting something in return”), to regional differences in niggas’ gangsta, to “A lot of situations…”

He trails off, comes back. “I got so much to talk about that I don’t even know where to start.”

Curtis Jackson was born July 6, 1976. He never knew his father. His mom passed away when he was eight. He was raised by his grandparents, who grew up in a time when a $100 pair of sneakers made sense like Al Sharpton running for President. By age 12 he was selling drugs. “I was on the boulevard selling quarter-grams,” he says referring to the $25 pieces of cocaine. His supplier gave him five pieces. He would pay for four, the profit from the last one was his payment. Coke was as popular as weed. “I was serving it to any and everybody,” he says. He sold to his aunts and uncles, who didn’t know he was a dealer. “Seem like I’m going to the store to get a friend of mine, but I already had it.” He bought those sneakers, kept them at his friend’s house. The friend kept his sneakers at Curtis’ crib. They had different shoe sizes, so all their guardians would say is, “Damn, why don’t you tell him to take his sneakers home?”

He got schooled by older dudes. The game was good and bad to him: He got new cars like niggas got new kicks; he went into police custody like niggas go to the corner store.

“He was always the nigga having beef on the block,” says a neighborhood friend. “When he was coming, niggas was like, ‘This nigga gonna get niggas robbed, take niggas work, ‘cause he want the whole block.’ He always wanted the whole block for himself.” He robbed the competition relentlessly. One guy came at him with a gun. “Yo, my daughter gotta eat,” the guy said.

I’m not trying to take food from your daughter’s mouth,” Curtis replied. “I’m just trying to get you to do it the right way.” The guy ended up getting work from Curtis. “I gave it to him on consignment,” he recalls. “I’m not stopping a nigga from totally doing what he would do. If you do that, then niggas is gonna kill you, bottom line.”

Around 1995 or 1996, Curtis decided to get into the rap game. He liked cats like KRS-One, Rakim and Nas. He took the name 50 Cent in homage to a deceased Brooklyn street lord. “I just preferred to take a gangsta nigga name out the hood than to take a nigga’s name like Al Capone.”

He told his crew about his plans. They thought I was crazy: What?...We ain’t never heard him rap before…He probably can’t…What he sound like? “At that time, Jamaica, everybody over there was hustling for me,” Curtis recalls. So no one was buying it. Besides, the neighborhood already had its rappers: The Lost Boyz. That one cat Freaky Tah (R.I.P) used to walk around with a boom box all day, freestyling while everyone else sold drugs. But 50 wanted to give music a chance.

“I have to internalize things—and it’s a damned shame—in a negative way to understand them,” he says. “I look at things from a street aspect ‘cause that’s what I understand; that’s when I knew for sure how to play it. All this other shit I don’t know. I never had a job in my life. That 9-to-5 shit is a trap. If you can’t make some money to invest as an entrepreneur, then fuck it.

“I watch my peoples. Like my grandfather, he was 65 years old. He got one house: the house I got shot in front of. And that house is worth, what? $160,000? Come on, the worst publishing deal is gonna buy that house for you right now. The niggas that’s doing bad right now—the niggas in the game that think we suck—should be able to have a house that cost $125,000. Just ‘cause they in the game. Even if they get $3,000 a show, $2,000 a show. So what? You do enough of them, you got mortgage money every month. You only got to do one a month.”

"50 Cent is one of the best MCs I ever worked with in my life,” says Jam Master Jay, the man behind Run D.M.C.'s turntables, who brought us Onyx and Jayo Felony. A mutual friend hooked up 50 and Jay in ’96. Jay gave 50 a beat on tape. 50 had no oconcept of song structure. He rhymed from when the beat began to when it ended. But the lyrics were hot. So Jay signed him to JMJ Records and put him on Onyx’s forgettable 1998 Shut ‘Em Down LP. They shot a video for the single “React,” which featured 50 and Onyx rapping and playing ice hockey. Well, it was a good idea.

50 quickly learned how to make songs. “You don’t run into an MC too often that can listen to a beat and come up with a whole concept with dope chorus and dope vocals in two hours,” says Jay. 50 struck the older cats as ahead of his time. “At the time, Jay-Z was new, and a couple of people was like, ‘He sound like Jay-Z and he’s harsh,’” recalss Jam Master.

“Like [he had one song] ‘Somehow the Rap Game Remind Me of the Crack Game.’ That was right on the money as to where Jay-Z was going in the future. Even like the Down South, ‘Big Pimpin’—type songs, he was already doing all that shit before Jay-Z.”

But Jam Master Jay’s touring schedule didn’t allow him to concentrate on 50, so the hungry MC decided to go elsewhere. In a local barbershop he met Cory Rooney, Senior VP at Columbia Records and member of the Trackmasters production troupe (whose label was then a subsidiary of Columbia). He played his tune “A Hit” for Cory in the car. But Cory wasn’t paying attention. He was on the phone. Former Fat Boy Prince Markie Dee was also in the car, but he was talking to someone out the window. When the song finished, Cory asked Markie, “What do you think?” Markie was non-chalant: “It’s alright.” 50 was mad pissed. “Man, gimme my tape, you niggas is mad old school,” he remembers saying. “And it fucked they head up that I would say that. They both was kinda offended.”

A week later, Cory, who had gotten 50’s number through a contact at the barbershop, called 50 at 2 a.m. He was going upstate to work with the Trackmasters and wanted 50 to come. 50 thought it was a setup: Did he rob one of Cory’s people? “I was like, ‘Nah, we could go tomorrow,’” says 50.

He went the next day. It was his big break and he was focused. “You can’t figure you gonna get rich by accident ‘cause too many niggas is trying,” 50 says. “That’s like thinking you gonna hit the Lotto and you ain’t buying no ticket.” Eighteen days later he had recorded 36 songs. “I didn’t care about being on Trackmasters or Columbia Records,” he said. “I figured coming back home with 36 Trackmasters [records] would get me a record deal. Fuck if it’s by them or who it’s by. It was a hustle to me.”

Trackmasters wanted him. But he was still signed to JMJ. “When I got on Columbia I had to give Jam Master Jay $50,000,” he says. “It was a business situation. I learned how to make the records, so I don’t regret it now, but $50,000 was a lot of money back then for a nigga fresh out the hood. I’m thinking it’s cheaper to kill him. I give a nigga 10 cent, blow his fuckin’ head off. But I said, ‘Let me do what I’m supposed to do.’ If I ain’t take in the things he showed me then, it wouldn’t be possible for me to make a dollar right now. So I regret even having those thoughts run across my mind.”

Eight months later, Curtis took 30 minutes to craft “How To Rob,” a song that name-checked over 40 rap and R&B celebrities, and threatened to relieve them of their jewels and cash. “At that point, I’m the only nigga that could have did ‘How To Rob,’ ‘cause I didn’t have relationships with niggas where I had to get on the phone and explain myself. It was like, Yo, it is what it is, and if you got a problem with it, let’s do whatever you wanna do. I’m not calling niggas to say, ‘Yo son, I put your name on a record.’ You call one nigga, now you gotta call everybody.

50 had cross-marketing plans that included a Celebrity Deathmatch video. It was a joke that went beyond keeping it real. It told the truth: Niggas is hungry, they will try to jack you. People got upset. Many people.

“I loved that niggas always had something to say about me,” says 50. “I respected these niggas that was saying thngs about me, like Pun, Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang niggas. Pretty much everybody who was somebody in the game—DMX, all of them—had something to say about me. I’m making my mark in a way that’s aggressive enough for everybody to acknowledge me immediately. Not five months from now, six months from now.”

He expected a reaction, but didn’t expect the level of reaction he got. Jay-Z called him out by name at Hot 97 Summer Jam: “I’m about a dollar, what the fuck is 50 Cent?”

“That’s the first time I ever seen 30,000 people stand up at one time,” says 50. “I didn’t even know that they knew me. That made niggas go to the radio.”

He ran into Jay-Z at P. Diddy’s restaurant Justin’s and thanked him. “Yo, I appreciate that,” 50 told him. Jigga laughed. “It probably tripped him out that I understood what was going on,” says 50. “I’m thinking business-wise. I don’t give a fuck what you saying, nigga. The reason for me saying what I was saying was for niggas to respond to me, to put me in.” 50 later hit Jigga on “Be A Gentleman,” rapping, “Look, if I shoot you, I’m famous/If you shoot me, you’re brainless/ You said it yourself.”

“I like niggas not liking me, ‘cause they don’t like each other,” he says. “They just pretend they like each other. The same niggas that smile at each other, give each other dap when they see each other, they laugh at each other when they catch bricks. You see a nigga catch a brick, you ever see one of his homies, niggas he was cool with that’s selling a lot of records come do a track with him? Nah, they leave them niggas alone. They get the fuck away from niggas and continue moving forward with their careers.”

“None of my situations with Ja Rule are big situations,” says 50. “They’re little. We had physical altercations. I was never hurt in none of those scenarios. I been hurt worse fuckin’ with my baby mother. I got a real stab wound from my baby mother and a little three-stitch situation from [messing with Ja Rule and his crew]. When you weigh the two, I’m more watching what I say about my baby mother than what I say about them, ‘cause she’ll cut me worse than them.”

50 says his problems with Ja Rule began when a friend of 50’s robbed Ja of a chain in Queens. A neighborhood heavy got the chain back for Ja. But Ja saw his robber and 50 being friendly in a club. When 50 approached Ja, Ja was miffed. “He treated me like I did something to him,” says 50. He told Ja, “I didn’t do nothing to you. That nigga that robbed you is right there. You ain’t got no problem with him, but you got a problem with me?’ That pissed me off.” He recorded a diss to Ja, “Your Life Is On the Line.” 50 later ran into Ja in Atlanta and punched him in the face, took his chain, and came back to New York. He returned the chain through a mutual friend. “I was like, ‘This is not about that. I don’t want this nigga’s chain.’” He was rewarded with a Movado watch from a third-party arbitrator, which suits him fine. He likes watches.

In March 2000, while 50 was recording at New York’s Hit Facotry, knife-wielding assailants broke into the session. A brouhaha ensued. Equipment was thrown. One of 50’s boys was stabbed on his fists, 50 got poked in the side. The assailants fled.

“Everybody in the room was like, ‘They gonna sue,’” recalls 50. But 50 felt it was a publicity move by Ja’s group, the Murderers, who were releasing their debut album at the time. He refused to bite. He didn’t check into the hospital until three days later, at the suggestion of his grandmother, who was worried about an infection from the wound. He received three stitches.

During the fight, someone backed into the wall and the lights fluttered. “They made it seem like it was gangsta,” 50 recalls. “I looked at it like it was a promotional stunt. The lights go off and then come on and I leave with three stitches? Well, then leave the fucking lights on, ‘cause niggas is leaving with 150-160 stitches in the club. So you turning the lights off made you stab the wrong nigga, so you did the wrong thing. That’s not gangsta.”

One Tuesday night that March, 50 lay in his bed thinking. He wanted to move out of his neighborhood. The streets were hot and he had a child to think about. The house where he’d lived his whole life borders on a major highway, which allows for easy access and quick getaways. Just sitting on the porch was asking for a driveby.

The next morning, a friend came to pick him up to go to the studio. This friend, in the front seat with his girlfriend, suggested that 50 go back in and get a bigger chain. He agreed and and came out packing two guns. Now they had $150,000 worth of baubles on them. While sitting in the back seat, 50 saw someone running up on him. Oh shit! he thought.

Shots rang out. 50 pulled a gun, stuck it out the window. A bullet struck his hand. His gun fell. The gunman stood over him and unloaded. 50 wanted to pass his other gun to his man, but his man's girlfriend was in the front seat, and it wasn't the type of situation to involve a woman any more than necessary. The gunman fled. 50's car sped off.

He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His face was bloody. When they reached the hospital, he slid from the car, but his right leg collapsed under him. That's when he realized he had also been shot in the leg. He was shot nine times in all.

He lay in intensive care for 12 days. Couldn't walk for a month. Got put on a liquid diet. Ate piping hot macaroni and cheese through a straw. "And it ain't stop or change anything to me," 50 says. Pulp Fiction's Jules Winnfield he's not.

"I know niggas that get a 1-to-3 [year jail sentences] and get religious," he says. "If you get shot nine times, you find God, you a different nigga, 'cause you sitting there wondering, 'How this nigga standing over me this close banging off nine times and can't finish?' All that fancy footwork, he like Allen Iverson going to the basket, shaking niggas, but he can't get the basket in. Niggas start thinking, 'It had to happen for a reason.'"

He feels he was shot to make him stronger. "When I talk to you, you look at my face, it's a bullet wound in my face," he says. He has a slight dimple in his left cheek and if you look very closely you can see a small difference in the two sides of his jawbone. "It's nothing, it's just a tooth missing. So how much more damage could that same shell has done? Give me an inch—you gone. But it's meant to happen the way it happened. So I don't even stress it. I just move on from there."

50 contends that it was a street situation that got him shot. "That's niggas making a decision in my hood," he says. "The same niggas that shot me woulda shot them niggas if I paid them first. If you from the street, take it as it comes.

"Niggas look to me to see which way we gonna go, what we gonna do," he says. "These niggas"–he motions to the guys in the room—"they would be hustling for me if I wasn't rapping. Everybody gotta eat. Your strength is in numbers. You realize that when you in the hospital with a brace in your mouth, your leg shot the fuck out and you like, 'Yo, I don't believe these niggas [shot me].' If I'm up to tell niggas, 'Go smoke them niggas,' niggas is dead the next day. But because I'm out, in the hospital, the situation is prolonged. They need you to stand there to say that."

50's shooting put pressure on an already strained relationship with his record label, Columbia, home to megastars like Lauryn Hill, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez. "Until you sell a lot of records," he says, "your name is just type on a piece of paper [to them]."

50 feels that the numerous collaborations he did while signed to Columbia—Destiny's Child, Kandi, Product G&B, Blaque—were the result of the buzz he created with "How To Rob," not the label's belief in him. "You got crackers that don't understand the slang you talking. The only way they find if you hot is they ask somebody in the hallway, 'You heard the new 50 Cent joint? Hot, right?' This is determining your fate. This is what determines if your record company is spending the money they supposed to support and promote your record properly. A cracker asking somebody in the elevator.

"It's been a year and these niggas in the office are not in position. They ain't know what to do with a nigga like me," he continues. "They ain't even know it was possible for a nigga to get shot. To the White folk that's in control, a Black male that gets shot up, that only happens on TV."

His relationship with Trackmasters' Tone and Poke has also soured. They had been editing his songs from day one—making him change names on "How To Rob," blanking out spaces where he named names on other songs. "I don't play that 'you my boss' shit with record company niggas," he says. "They couldn't deal with half of the shit I dealt with so far. I send a nigga to cut one of these niggas in the face, they can't take being cut in the face, they can't take that. But I gotta take you telling me what I'm gonna say and what I'm not gonna say on my record?"

He also felt that Tone and Poke, who concentrated on artists like the pop group Blaque, didn't focus enough on him. "We never worked on a big record," he says. 50 thinks that the duo, who served as Senior VPs of Black Music at Columbia, had other interests. "They for sale," he says. "They still not executives. Executives have priorities. You don't see Puffy dancing in a video if it ain't a Bad Boy video."

50 Cent has been released from Columbia. "I'm so happy right now," he says. "I feel like I got the whole fuckin' world. A lot of different options." But he regrets not losing his first album, Power Of the Dollar, which Columbia quietly put out as a five-song EP. Especially the song "Ghetto Qu'Ran," a rundown of infamous Queens drug lords and their deeds. "'Ghetto Qu'Ran' is the realest song written so far," 50 says. "It's nothing false about it. The veterans got the wall, and all the niggas from Queens got, the ones that was doing something back then, is that song. That's the only record that I regret that I lost off of that scenario, 'cause that was an important record. And it's not on a hit album that sold five million copies which the world recognize as a great record." [Note: Because Sony apparently never petitioned Napster to remove 50's songs from their files, you can get most of his prodigious output through the file-sharing software.]

50's been in talks with various labels, but he's taking his time to sign. "I don't like to meet with people until I have the records that they're looking for," he says. "And I know what they're looking for: radio records.

"I been considering Death Row as a record label," he continues. "Just because that's a place that will understand what kind of music I'm writing. That's a possibility. It's a possibility I might put the record out myself.

"Before I release an album, I'ma make sure hear me happy, upset, hear some humor, like I ain't had a problem in the world. Emotionally you should change as an artist, so a nigga can really enjoy the record. Right now I got records that make a nigga wanna kill a nigga, just because they listening to what my mindframe was coming from being shot up."

But 50 is moving on. "My focus ain't even on no scenarios right now," he says. "My focus is on making the biggest records I can make. We had plans before that [shooting took place]. I'm just gonna continue to make my plans work right, and then we see how we deal with it from there.

"In the event that things don't go right, you should look forward to hearing things in the street," he continues. "Niggas in the hood better have their fingers crossed that we do good, 'cause there ain't no Plan B. If this don't work, I'm coming back, I'm taking everything—absolutely everything. And it's not possible for me to take every single block down there, so what I gotta do is—I got the team already—we gonna take every single dollar out a nigga pocket everytime we see him. So you can have the block, but we coming to get the money from you."

More 50 Cent stories:

Previously: 50 Cent’s "Get Rich Or Die Tryin’": By the Numbers
Previously: From the Archives: 50 Cent Speaks on “How To Rob”

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