50 Cent: It's All in the Game

By Harry Amana
SeeingBlack.com Media Critic

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Talk about the commodification of the hip-hop gangster! 50 Cent has clandestinely crept into our culture and created an iconic nightmare for many parents across the country. No, I'm not talking about some new coinage from the U.S. Treasury Department; I'm talking about Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, the 27-year-old, ex-dope pusher from Queens whose hit rap album, "Get Rich Or Die Tryin" has sold almost six million copies since its release in February. He's the headliner in the Rock the Mic Tour that has been grossing $5 million a concert this summer.

I say "iconic nightmare" because his personal and lyrical images are the stuff of middle- and working-class horror flicks. Numerous articles in Newsweek, Billboard and every major newspaper have chronicled his conviction for drug pushing at 19, the two attempts on his life (he was stabbed in 1999 and shot nine times in 2000), his sponsorship by notorious White rapper Eminem, and his subsequent meteoric rise to fame with gangsta songs featuring every negative stereotype ever associated with rap and hip-hop music. 50, as he is commonly referred to in the media, has had as many as nine singles on the charts at once this year. Their subject matter has included a glorification of gun violence, drug use, sexual exploitation, misogyny and derogatory language describing gays.

His latest chartbuster, for example, is P.I.M.P., a rap/song that heralds—in the most derogatory language and imagery imaginable—the glories of being a purveyor of female flesh. Here's the conclusive couplet, if you will: "Hoe make a pimp rich, I aint paying bitch..." [This is consistent with the recent renewed craze over pimping. HBO's documentary "Pimps Up, Hos Down" director published a follow-up hardback photo-and-essay book last year called Pimpnosis, which is "dedicated to the game"; and there are at least two other singles on the Billboard charts this summer applauding the practice.]

Now, to be fair, one of 50 Cent's hits includes 21 Questions, a love poem of sorts, in which he asks his loved one a series of questions to determine whether she would stay with him under any circumstance. But even the most sensitive lines of this piece end with a sexual distraction: "Now would you leave me if your father found out I was thuggin'? /Do you believe me when I tell you, you the one I'm loving? /Are you mad 'cause I'm asking you 21 questions? /Are you my soulmate? 'Cause if so, girl you a blessing /Do you trust me enough, to tell me your dreams? /I'm staring at ya' trying to figure how you got in them jeans."

But, hey, this is the U.S. of A. and if you can make a buck off it, make a buck! Witness the commodification of 50 Cent. The hypnotic six-note hook from his "In Da Club" single was secured for timeouts in some NBA arenas last season. [Yeah, you've heard it with the opening words, "Go, go, go shawty/ It's your birthday/ We gon' party like it's yo birthday..."]. It has also been picked up during commercial-break lead-ins in at least one late-night talk show. And, of course, we've all heard it somewhere or another this summer pounding from the SUVs of our young adults, even if we didn't realize what it was at the time.

Meanwhile, Ecko Unlimited has contracted with 50 to produce a clothing line that already includes at least five T shirts that feature his G-Unit logo. G-Unit (Guess what the G stands for?) is the name of his back-up team that produces those repetitious music lines. And to complete your 50 Cent gear, Reebok just signed him to a shoe deal with its rbk line that features NBA athlete Allen Iverson. According to the Reebok Web site, you can "get the first look at the hot new 50 Cent shoe!" by dropping off your email address. "The G6 will be available in the fall," the site notes. "Sign up now and we'll e-mail you when it's available. Be the first to get it!" (This for the dude whose fame is based on hip-hop rhymes and music, not his athleticism.]

There's also a DVD entitled "50 Cent: The New Breed" and an autobiography due out by next year. Want still more on this new cultural iconic commodity that our teenagers and young adults have been reveling with this summer? His police sheet, arrest warrant, conviction and plea bargain, as well as the lab analysis of his 83 percent cocaine product can be accessed on www.thesmokinggun.com. (It includes the NYPD arrest report of how he used his 16-year-old female accomplice as the person who furnished the drugs to street buyers from the stash that she hid in her panties.] His Web homepage, opening with gunshots, splattering glass and an in-your-face picture of 50 pointing a gun at you through a shattered window pane, can be accessed at www.50cent.com. A sample of his G-Unit clothing line with links to his hit videos "Wanksta" and "In Da Club" is available at www.50centonline.com. His lyrics are available at www.raplyricssearch.com.

Or better still, just dig deeply into your pockets and catch him in the summer tour, at top dollar! The hip-hop gangster, like the Jewish, Italian and Irish gangsters before him, is alive and well, and available to the highest bidder.

As boxing promoter Don King has said: "Only in America!"

From Sell-Out to Playa-Hater

By John L. Jackson, Jr.
Special to SeeingBlack.com

There used to be "sell-outs" in the Black community. Remember that? Black people called "Uncle Toms" or "House Negroes" and considered beyond the pale of authentic racial belonging. Black Americans believed to put themselves and their personal interests above the plight of their race got their identities challenged (or, more colloquially, their "Ghetto Passes" revoked) as comeuppance. Does anyone remember those days?

At 32, I'm not too young to recall some of that history, but the era of the Black sell-out is over. The phrase is hopelessly antiquated now. Sure, a few racial diehards may still try vainly to invoke it, but that's only nostalgia talking, some quaint invocation of a bygone moment when afros and dashikis were the norm and Black Power was a politic of the street-corner. In 2003, no one takes the notion of sell-outs seriously anymore, at least not in Black America.

Let's use Clarence Thomas as an example. There was a time when the second Black Supreme Court Justice would have been unequivocally deemed a sell-out for consistently ruling against the kinds of legislation that many Blacks consider in their group's collective best interest. Just last month, Thomas voted against the University of Michigan's affirmative action methods in both their hard (undergraduate) and soft (law school) incarnations. Once upon a time, his judicial antics would have been considered the epitome of selling out. Not anymore. People might call him conservative, hypocritical, even fascistic, but they don't dare call him a sell-out. Why not? Simple. The sell-out has been replaced in contemporary African-America's cultural parlance by the equally demonized playa-hater, the sell-out's ideological opposite.

The playa-hater is the sell-out's accusatory rejoinder. If the Playa embraces the capitalist and individualist ethic of contemporary American culture with a vengeance (racking up cars, homes and jewelry), the Playa-Hater is the jealous loser who disingenuously invokes anything (including and especially racial solidarity) to explain his own failures and to de-legitimize the playa's success. The playa's usual response to such charges is swift and sure: "Don't hate the playa; hate the game."

Even someone like Jayson Blair would have once been considered a sell-out, pelted with such accusations both on his way up the journalistic ladder (for choosing to work at The New York Times, over, say The Amsterdam News) and back down again (for embarrassing Black folks, letting down the race-and so publicly, too). Now everyone just waits longingly for that TNT biopic. In the age of the playa, he's an ultimate leading man.

As an aside, it should be noted that the idea of selling-out was always unfairly (even misogynistically) applied—allowing O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry protective cover from much internal, community-based criticism during their media-saturated bouts with infamy. (Depending on details of the recently revealed Kobe Bryant sex-assault charge, all of this could play itself out again real soon.) And even Clarence Thomas benefited from such racial wagon circling in the Anita Hill affair. For some, the moral of all these stories is that racial laundry should always be discretely dry-cleaned, never hand-washed and air-dried out in the open for all the world to see.

But that was the late 20th century. Now there are no more sell-outs. Not really. The closest we get these days, the last tiny remnant, is the oft-quoted notion of "acting White," a charge leveled at Blacks who aren't deemed Black enough because of their everyday behavior and style. Social scientists use this idea of "acting White" as a major explanation for underachieving Black schoolchildren. However, accusations of "acting White" criticize an aesthetic (how people dress, walk, talk, etc.) not a politic (racial commitment, solidarity, etc.)—and the difference is crucial.

You'll rarely hear Black people call Clarence Thomas a sell-out anymore (again, a few racial diehards notwithstanding), but you will constantly hear folks say that he sounds White, wants to be White, wishes he were White, married a White woman, etc. These critiques are only tangentially about his judicial decisions. They are mostly issues of racial style dressed up to replace any real engagement with racial ideological. The playa is a playa because he has money, success, and the pimp-strut—and he can inoculate himself from the Kryptonite of "acting White" without recourse to any discussion about politics. All Clarence Thomases need do is work on their striding gaits.

The point isn't that we should renew age-old practices of racial witch-hunting. Rather, we need to find ways of re-imagining a racial politic that takes substance over style and reasoning over rhetoric. That would be a beginning. But for now, the playa reigns supreme, and all resistance appears futile: "Don't playa hate, participate." That's what the kids say. Such a phrase may stand as an ultimate expression of socio-political acquiescence to global capitalism, but right now, it also seems to be the only game in town.

John L. Jackson, Jr., is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University and author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America.

-- September 12, 2003

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