50 Cent: The Cinderella Man

You can rehash all the clichés in the book and they will all gel with him:

A tough kid on the block.

A graduate of the School of Hard Knocks.

Hero of the underdogs.

The King from Queens.

And, yes, Cinderella Man.

Curtis Jackson, more popularly known as 50 Cent, is all this and much more.

He’s the Bad Guy of Rap, not much different from Eminem, his idol and discoverer.

50 Cent was in Taipei Friday last week for a concert at an open-air stadium (the biggest in Taiwan) filled three-fourths by the city’s rap/hip-hop fans who came with hair in multi-color, pants hanging loose with the waistline almost reaching the knees and lungs fully-charged to meet 50 Cent’s every number with ear-splitting screams. So it was drizzling? Who cares? The fans came also armed with plastic raincoats.

The morning before the concert, 50 Cent faced the Asian press for a no-holds-barred interview.

I showed up at a function room of Westin Taipei with the texted "warning" from Edmund Silvestre, news editor of the New York-based The Filipino Reporter, ringing in my ears: He’s called Fitty Cent here – slang, you know. I saw his movie Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (released in November last year) at medyo hilaw pa siya as an actor. Terrence Howard, who was briefly Dayanara Torres’ boyfriend, easily stole the movie from him. When I watched the movie, rappers and gangster-looking people were all over the place. Cops were called in, just in case, because in one moviehouse there was a rumble which landed in the news. Beware of Fifty Cent because he always gets involved in shootouts and fistfights. Be ready to dodge!

Edmund’s friendly warning, although made in jest, held some water because, as the whole rappin’/hip-hoppin’ world knows, 50 Cent seems to be where trouble erupts – and vice-versa. In one of those rumbles, he took nine gunshots which he luckily survived.

A paragraph from the press kit capsules 50 Cent’s shady childhood and phenomenal rise to stardom:

By now, the hard-boiled story of 50 Cent has become ghetto folklore. Born and raised in the notorious Queens, New York, drug scene in the late ’70s, a young and fatherless Curtis Jackson was forced into manhood at an early age as his mother became a casualty of the dope game. 50 Cent worshippers know the rest of the story – the steady rise to local drug boss, the lengthy jail-plagued rap sheet, the long hours perfecting his rhyming craft under the watchful eye of Run DMC’s late great Jam Master Jay, and the nine gunshots that nearly took his life.

By 2000, 50 Cent was dropped from his recording deal with Columbia Records, spending the next few months in recovery. With the help of business partner Sha Money XL, 50 Cent landed back on his feet and released a series of G-Unit mix-tapes that set the ‘hood on fire. The unrelenting tracks got the attention of bitter rival MCs and, more importantly, Eminem who signed 50 Cent to a $1-M record deal in 2002. Hip-hop history was made. His debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, has so far sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

His new album, also released locally by MCA Universal Records (which invited The STAR, the only one from the Philippines, to the Taipei gig), is called Massacre and it just might do exactly that to the competition on the hit charts.

Fortunately, at the presscon, 50 Cent didn’t do that to the media guys who pelted him with questions with relentless glee. Surprisingly, 50 Cent failed to live up to his "bad boy" reputation. Wearing a crucifix as pendant, he sat on stage with his back-up boys, flashing a meek-as-a-lamb smile that showed his perfect set of Close-Up-worthy teeth. No, he didn’t bully anybody. He was as polite and as courteous as an altar boy, not raising his voice at all even when he was asked if his "bad boy" image was for real or just a put-on.

What you see is what you get; what you hear is for real – oops! Not all of it anyway.

"Because of my background," he said, smiling widely, "everytime there’s trouble somewhere people associate me with it. I grew up on the streets in a tough neighborhood. The niggas were looking out for me. It’s a matter of survival. Either you kill somebody or somebody kills you – or you land in jail. It was music that took me out of and away from that ‘hood; it was Eminem who saved me from the streets. I made a name and a reputation being a ‘bad boy.’ Now that I am known, I wonder why people want to change me. I have never hidden anything from my fans who have accepted me for what I am, I’m being myself, without any pretentions, so I can’t understand why some people now want me to change."

And why was he called 50 Cent instead of, say, 50 Dollars?

"They called me 50 Cent in relation to my origin," he said.

It is, you must agree, a monicker that has lost relevance in the face of his enormous success that translates in terms of staggering millions and not mere cents.

At one point, he turned naughty.

Asked about his impression of Taiwanese girls, 50 Cent said they were very pretty. "I might make my next baby here," he winked. "Why not?"

If you’re not a rap/hip-hop fan like this one, you will be shocked by the lyrics of 50 Cent songs which casually drop cuss/four-letter words much too disturbing and scandalous to be quoted in this piece.

Here’s how 50 Cent explained the thrust of his Massacre album:

"With this album, I’m covering what was missed in Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I’m more of a hustler than all of the other things, so I talk about that aspect of my life – the struggles that I and everybody in my ‘hood went through. I think rappers take the easy way out. They write about how they sold drugs and did dirt as if there were no repercussions. They don’t write about the effects of street life. They don’t write about how that lifestyle alters them, and that right there is more interesting. When you do that, you are touching a lot of people."

And that night at the biggest stadium in Taiwan, there I was in the thick of rap/hip-hop fans, like a little boy lost trying to swing and sway to a music he couldn’t quite grasp, trying to go with the flow – in vain. Only a few nights ago, I was at the Big Dome in Manila floating back to the past on the wings of The Lettermen and Andy Williams’ love songs and there I was Friday night being blasted back to the future, the here and now, by a sound that I couldn’t relate to no matter how hard I tried.

One thing was loud and clear: The King from Queens rules – and how!!!

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