The Man and the Machine: On 20 Years of 50 Cent and ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’

If you remember anything from the “In da Club” video, you remember the way 50 Cent enters the frame: from above, suspended in midair by a sit-up bar as doctors in white lab coats scribble notes around him. This is Curtis Jackson III, who used to be a chubby kid known as Boo Boo; the Grecian physique is not proof of lifelong stability and good habits, but the result of a crash rehabilitation in the wake of an attempt on his life that left him with bullet wounds in his hand, arm, chest, leg, and left cheek. But you don’t know any of that right now. He runs on a treadmill and does chest presses with electrodes placed on his pecs. No one else touches any of the equipment—this is a controlled environment.

The video’s superstructure is that it takes place at the “Shady/Aftermath Artist Development Center” in a remote desert location. At another point in the clip, Dr. Dre and Eminem—also in lab coats—watch from a glassed-off gallery as a team of surgeons tweaks the switchboard in this unconscious rapper’s back. Even the club scenes, where partyers (including a young Compton rapper named The Game, though no one likes to acknowledge this) dance to the song, take place in a lab setting. It’s a knowing comment on the time, resources, and precision required to turn a promising artist into a commercial behemoth.

And while Dre, Eminem, and the Interscope suits executed that transformation as well as any team of hypothetical scientists might have, the video treatment overstates the work they had to do. By the time 50 Cent recorded “In da Club” in 2002, he was more or less fully formed: a New York native who slotted neatly into the genre’s most hallowed lineages but was too self-assured to feign reverence for them, a rapper eager to threaten his enemies with chilling specificity but determined to Trojan horse those threats into regular radio rotation. He was the logical end point of the most hard-core rap the 1990s had to offer, but he also guaranteed that it would be played in middle school gyms: He was a rogue agent who had perfected his formal approach under the tutelage of industry veterans before ever meeting Dre.

“In da Club” was issued as the lead single from Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the debut album that would almost instantly turn 50 Cent into one of the most recognizable musicians on the planet. Released 20 years ago Monday, Get Rich smooths out some of the knottier—and most fascinating—aspects of 50’s earlier work, trading the digressions and codes for language general enough to be digestible by everyone. It’s a strategy that, in combination with other factors, would eventually dull his charms to the point of totally erasing them. But at its apex, 50’s arc represented the absolute height of the record industry’s star-making powers, just before the system stopped working for good.

You figure there were times 50 wanted to scream at Jam Master Jay. In 1997, he spotted the Run-D.M.C. legend outside of a club in Manhattan and, having heard that he was looking for artists to develop, insisted that he was JMJ’s man. Despite having scarcely set foot in a recording booth, 50 got a production deal. At this time, 50 rapped a little like Jay and a little like Mase, though he was drawing on a truly singular biography. Raised by his grandparents in Jamaica, Queens, after his single mother was killed by rival drug dealers who sedated her and then turned on the gas in her apartment, 50 learned to box, then sell crack, then freestyle. On record, he was always confrontational and extremely funny, but JMJ made him write hooks over and over to the same beats to imprint song structure and the economy of language on his brain.

Run-D.M.C.’s touring schedule got in the way of 50 and JMJ’s recording sessions, and 50 soon found a new home: with the Trackmasters, the production duo that had a long track record of commercial hits and that had helmed Queens icon Nas’s It Was Written. (50 was briefly considered as a member of The Firm, Nas’s group formed around this time, but was ultimately passed over.) The Trackmasters arrangement became a full deal with Columbia, and 50 finished an album, Power of the Dollar, complete with a novelty single in which 50 imagines mugging stars (“How to Rob”), a collaboration with Destiny’s Child (“Thug Love”), and street singles that were beloved (“Your Life’s on the Line”) and controversial (“Ghetto Qur’an,” which raised eyebrows for its catalog of names from the Queens drug trade).

Power of the Dollar’s scheduled release was canceled by Columbia after 50 was shot nine times while sitting in a car outside of his grandmother’s house in Queens. While still recuperating in the hospital, he was dropped from the label. Once he had gotten rid of his walker, and deemed New York unsafe, 50 retreated to Toronto, where he did little but work out and continue the writing exercises JMJ and the Trackmasters had taught him, recordings hundreds of songs and finding a new diction that accommodated the bullet fragment in his tongue. Soon, he was releasing mixtapes—50 Cent Is the Future; No Mercy, No Fear; and God’s Plan, all of which featured Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo, who he had roped into his group, G-Unit—that revealed a rapper who had shed his influences completely and could bend even the most recognizable beats into his orbit. He rattled through irresistible choruses as afterthoughts and turned himself into rap’s most charming antihero since 2Pac.

When Dre and Eminem decided that 50’s talent outweighed whatever headaches he might bring with him, they flew him to Los Angeles for a five-day series of recording sessions. That week yielded seven songs, including “In da Club.” From his first brushes with Aftermath, 50 exerted his personality over everything he touched: the exaggerated drawl that runs through “Wanksta,” the out-of-hand dismissal of Lauryn Hill that Eminem allowed onto the 8 Mile soundtrack. But everything became channeled toward the goal of making him an inescapably massive force. Most of 50’s lashing out (from the past: “If I catch another case, I’ma kill Giuliani”) was now funneled toward Ja Rule; while he had personal beef with him going back a couple years, fans at a distance could merely see a harder-edged rapper with some melodic chops edging out his slightly sunnier, conspicuously smaller predecessor. Imagine the Al Pacino scene from the beginning of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood if his and Leo DiCaprio’s characters both had opinions about Irv Gotti.

Around the time 50 was shot, Rakim was faced with something of a crisis. The MC who redefined the craft in the 1980s had just released his second post–Eric B. album, The Master, to middling sales and little excitement. Despite the DJ Premier–produced “When I B on tha Mic,” and despite an enduring reputation as rap’s preeminent technician, he felt himself becoming obsolete: The $300,000 advance he’d received from Universal was less than half of what he’d been given for 1997’s The 18th Letter and was an even steeper drop from the contract he and Eric had signed with MCA in 1987, the one that had made them hip-hop’s first million-dollar act. It was at this nadir that he came close to a deal with DreamWorks Records. As the parties were finalizing terms, the label reached out to Dr. Dre, asking if he would be interested in producing some records for Rakim after he officially signed. “Hold on,” Dre said. “After he signs?”

Dre got on the phone with Ra, imploring him to hold off on the paperwork. Before long, he sent over some of his own: The rapper would sign to Aftermath for over $1 million. Ra and his wife left their three children with grandparents in New York and drove across the country to a Los Angeles apartment rented for them by Interscope. The promise was a Dre-helmed album heavy on live instrumentation and orchestral arrangements. But once he was out west, Ra found Dre elusive. A planned three-month stay went by without any meaningful work between the duo, as the producer was tied up with Xzibit’s Man vs. Machine and Truth Hurts’s Truthfully Speaking (the latter of which featured Rakim on its lead single). “Six months in, I hadn’t really started working with Dre,” Ra wrote in his 2019 autobiography. The kids moved to L.A. and got set up in school, and there were still few songs to show for it.

Worse than the logistical hang-ups were the creative disagreements that arose when the sessions began in earnest. Time and again, Dre urged Ra to tell the sorts of street stories that dotted Dre’s own catalog and those of the rappers he had mentored since splitting from N.W.A. “I was a father of three in my forties,” Ra went on to write. “I wanted to expand consciously.” He acknowledges, though, that Dre had reason to believe street raps would come easily: The pair had a mutual friend who liked to tell stories about what Ra and his circle of devious friends would get up to in the ’80s. One of those friends, pictured on the back cover of 1987’s Paid in Full, is a thin young man in a deep crouch, wearing a red Adidas hat and a giant gold medallion: Kelvin Martin, better known as the original 50 Cent, a legendary Brooklyn stickup kid. That LP came out in July of ’87; in October of that year, Martin was shot and killed at 23.

Eventually, Rakim left Aftermath, turning down the quarter of a million dollars Dre offered him to stay. In his wake were beats that he’d been given and discarded—beats like the gun-cock seesaw that would become “Heat,” the preposterously venomous piece at the center of Get Rich or Die Tryin’. (“I don’t care if I get caught,” 50 raps, in his most effective vocal performance on the album. “The D.A. can play this motherfucking tape in court.”) In fact, by the time he and his family merged onto the 10 east, Ra was rumored to have rapped on nearly everything from the Aftermath camp that would end up on Get Rich. Though 50’s defining characteristic—other than the bullet-dictated lisp—was a gleeful rebelliousness, he proved a far more agreeable clay for Dre to mold. In fact, much of Get Rich plays like a proof of concept: The Rockwilder-produced “Like My Style” sounds for all the world like a reference track ready to be emailed to an artist groping around in the dark for a hit; even a creative success like “21 Questions” scans as a writing exercise.

When his idiosyncrasies do bleed through, they often make for the album’s most compelling material. While the chorus on “High All the Time” smacks of focus-group triangulation, 50 makes the odd, instantly memorable choice to open with a long melodic passage—which ensures that when he does lapse into a rapping delivery, the listener bolts upright. This is an approach 50 had employed before, though never on a song where he pledged to “go at Nas and Jigga both for the throne.” On “Back Down,” where 50 finally airs all his grievances with Ja, there’s no way to sand off the rough edges. (“And your boss is a bitch,” 50 raps early in the song, referencing Irv. “If he could he would / Sell his soul for cheap, trade his life to be Suge.”) And on “Many Men,” 50 literally names the man he believes shot him; three years later, reporters covering a separate trial could hear a defense attorney shouting, in a judge’s chambers, “Hommo did it. Hommo did it. Hommo did it. Even 50 Cent says it!”

That level of detail is what makes Get Rich a great rap record, but they are not what made it a nine-time platinum. That would be the piano bombast of “If I Can’t,” the slick “P.I.M.P.,” and the sense—underpinning everything, even the taunts about Ja sounding like a Sesame Street character—that 50 was so massive and so inevitable that he could be traded on the Nasdaq. There are beats on Get Rich that stamp it, unavoidably, as a product of the early 2000s—in ways good (“Poor Lil Rich,” “Gotta Make It To Heaven”) and regrettable (“Like My Style,” Eminem’s drab “Don’t Push Me”)—but it seemed at the time like a wave that would keep cresting forever.

There is, of course, no evidence of any corporate planning, and it wouldn’t exactly be a scandal if there was. But it’s easy to imagine that in early 2007, someone somewhere in one of the buildings owned by Universal Music Group had an idea: pit the upcoming albums from 50 Cent and Kanye West—Curtis and Graduation, respectively—against one another. It would be one thing to encourage the swap of a beat for a few hooks, to arrange a joint appearance on 106 & Park, to hope that LPs released within a month or so of one another might tie a nice little bow on the balance sheet. Or, get the principals to pose nose-to-nose on the cover of Rolling Stone and gin up a feud that would turn the marketing cycle into a battle of ideology.

By 2007, Kanye, already one of hip-hop’s biggest stars, seemed primed to cross over in a way that would put him at the center of American pop culture. Meanwhile, 50’s sophomore album, 2005’s The Massacre, sold more records in its first week (1.15 million) than any rap album other than The Marshall Mathers LP; this was less than a year and a half after the G-Unit debut, Beg for Mercy, nearly stole the top Billboard spot from The Black Album, Jay-Z’s retirement celebration.

But 50’s grip had begun to loosen, even if SoundScan was slow to notice. Neuroscientists, philosophers, and the authors of airport bestsellers have for decades debated the nature of genius and the contours of creative thought. There is predictably little consensus on what makes great artists produce masterpieces or what makes them stop. But it seems clear that the currency of great work is expertise, taste, and formal inventiveness, rather than finite experience. While it’s important to live in and observe the world, there is no 1-to-1 relationship between lived experience and effective art; if there were, the great books, movies, and albums would all be written by plane-crash survivors. It’s easy to see 50’s catalog as an argument for this position. The innumerable mixtape songs that made other artists’ radio records grittier and poppier at the same time, all while becoming a vehicle for 50’s supernova charisma, were churned out at a clip so rapid that they seemed less like discrete achievements than the inevitable product of his being. There is even a small moment on Get Rich that evokes this feeling—it’s the transition from “Many Men,” where he has bargained with God over the attempts on his life and seen the murder of his would-be assassin as biblical justice, directly into “In da Club,” where his biggest concern is if Xzibit is comfortable in 50’s VIP booth. You produce, and you keep moving.

Maybe 50’s creative decline was simply a case of burnout. As has been relitigated ad infinitum in the press and on Instagram Lives, 50 made significant creative contributions to The Documentary, the major-label debut from The Game, who had been floundering on Interscope before being grafted, at Jimmy Iovine’s request, onto G-Unit. The two biggest singles from that record, “How We Do” and “Hate It or Love It,” are built around star turns by 50; he is widely reported to have written several other hooks and to have gifted several choice beats from his own sessions. This division of his attention presumably contributed to the flatness of the filler material on the too-long The Massacre—and to its delay from mid-February to early March. That album was originally marketed as The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and while the title was hastily chopped in half when it moved off that date, its opening skit is an obvious relic of that version; the airtight execution of Get Rich was a luxury that surely could have been afforded, but no one bothered to pursue it.

As this was happening, the CD-sales economy was crumbling. In 2000, nearly a billion physical albums were shipped in the United States alone; in 2007, that number had fallen by nearly 50 percent. The Curtis-versus-Graduation sales race, along with Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III from the following summer, represented the last echo of this commercial boom. In 2015, The New Yorker ran a feature on Dell Glover, who in the early- and mid-2000s leveraged his job at a CD manufacturing plant into a career as one of the world’s most prolific leakers of major-label albums onto file-sharing networks. By ’07, the pursuit, which only a few years prior had been exhilarating and all-consuming, had begun to bore Glover and his associates, to the point where this particular release date was treated as a Clint Eastwood–like one last job. Glover leaked both albums but made sure Graduation hit the internet first, which would presumably hurt Kanye’s sales more than 50’s. It still outsold Curtis by nearly 300,000 copies.

While those results have often been overstated as Kanye ending an era of gangsta rap, the truth is much more banal, on two levels. The first is that the model of music 50 embodied did not go anywhere. Kanye certainly spawned imitators and convinced record executives that everymen in his mold were commercially viable, but whether you prefer gangsta rap or street rap (or find both terms needlessly limiting), the succession of regional and national stars that followed 50 often work in this tradition: see Rick Ross and Young Jeezy; see T.I. and Gucci Mane; see the scenes that have crystallized more recently in Memphis, Los Angeles, Michigan, and on and on. The second way this argument about September 11, 2007, as a paradigm shift exaggerates itself is by giving Kanye too much agency over 50’s career. The truth is that Curtis failed to connect with audiences because it simply isn’t any good, with 50 sleepwalking through the dregs of the sterile, expensive production style Dre and Scott Storch had touted in the early 2000s.

Everyone who is famous now is famous forever. But 50 in particular has stuck in pop culture in a way that his creative output would not seem to dictate. He was the biggest rapper on the planet 20 years ago, but many self-described rap fans could not name a song of his from the past 15. And yet: How many rappers have broader name recognition, in America or globally? One of the MCs on that short list, Snoop Dogg—whose own debut, 1993’s Doggystyle, is probably the closest analogue the genre has to Get Rich—surprises every few years with new albums that are slyly inventive, or at least loose enough to foreground his obvious, durable skills.

There is no such half-life for 50. This is in part because, while the artist 50 Cent had undeniable appeal and reliable pop instincts, the phenomenon of 50 Cent is inextricable from an era that is unrecognizable today, one in which the machinery that produced rap stars was huge and crude but essentially undefeated—before the labels charged with mapping it onto release calendars and DSPs decided it had to be balkanized and algorithm-ized. And while 50’s image and songs were made ubiquitous, the man himself was remote—today, the only artists expected, or given the resources, to chase down-the-middle superstardom are expected to be constantly available and supposedly real in ways that sap them of any mystery, any danger. Nothing is semiotic because nothing is withheld. And for 50 to become what he became, he had to leverage and subvert symbols and archetypes that were meaningful to audiences. They no longer are, and so 50 no longer could. At least his debut’s audacious title was realized. As he rapped in 2007, when there was nothing left but decline, “I’ma die trying to spend this shit.”

Paul Thompson is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.