questioned Ja Rule’s masculinity and place in hip hop. Though his
record label, Interscope Records, packaged him as a new style pop
figure 50’s image harkened back to a darker and more cynical era in
hip hop, a period when ruthless gangstas defined the movement’s
pop persona and made its move on the nation’s pop music charts.
Many blamed the celebration of all things gangsta for the senseless
murders of two of hip hop’s most talented figures, 2Pac (Tupac
Shakur) and the Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace). The mar-
keting of 50 Cent came straight from the script that guided 2Pac’s
meteoric rise and tragic fall.

While his music was a stirring mix of party anthems, hypercapi-

talism, gangsta swagger, and pop posturing, it was really the selling of
50’s background that upped the ante. His life as a petty drug dealer,
the death of his crack-addicted mother, and his miraculous survival
of nine bullets formed a classic ghetto tale that put him on the pop
map. That biography earned him the most important credential in
corporate hip hop, street credibility. Hip hop’s claim to fame is the
claim of authenticity in its undaunted portrayals of ghetto reality.
Cloaked in the armor of authenticity 50 boasted that his rhymes
about ghetto life, struggle, and survival were real and not commer-
cially premeditated.

Equally important, the bid for street credibility is also part of the

marketing and selling of hip hop, how the movement’s entrepre-
neurial elite manage to generate that all-important buzz and hip
presence in a cluttered and competitive pop culture economy. It was,
in essence, hip hop’s own Faustian bargain. In exchange for global
celebrity, pop prestige, and cultural influence hip hop’s top perform-
ers had to immerse themselves into a world of urban villainy that by
the new millennium had lost sight of the line between pop life and
real life.

It was, without question, one of the cruelest ironies in the rise and

transformation of hip hop: the fact that its livelihood—indeed its
very survival as a pop culture juggernaut—rested almost entirely on
its ability to sell black death. The embrace of guns, gangsterism, and

P R O L O G U E

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