http://www.robertvaughn.org/
50 Cent, born Curtis James Jackson III, grew up in the South JamaIca neighborhood of Queens in New York CitY. He grew up without a father and was raised by his mother Sabrina Jackson, who gave birth to him at the age of fifteen. Sabrina, a cocaine dealer,..!! raised Jackson until the age of eight, when she was murdered.. Twenty-three at the time, she became unconscious after someone drugged her drink. She was then left for dead after the gas in her apartment was turned on and the windows shut closed. After her death, Jackson moved into his grandparents' house with his eight aunts and uncles.He recalls, "My grandmother told me, 'Your mother's not coming home. She's not gonna come bacK to pick you up. You're gonna stay with US now.' That's when I started adjusting to the streets a little bit".Jackson grew up with his younger cousin, Michael Francis, who earned the nickname "25 Cent" for being his younger counterpart. Francis raps under the stage name "Two Five".!!!!
Jackson's mug shot on August 23, 1994. Jackson began boxing around the age of eleven. At fourteen, a neighbor opened a boxing gym for local kids. "When I wasn't killing time in school, I was sparring in the gym or selling crack on the strip", he recalled. In the mid 1980s, he competed in the Junior Olympics as an amateur boxer. He recounts, "I was competitive in the ring and hip-hop is competitive too... I think rappers condition themselves like boxers, so they all kind of feel like they're the champ". At the age of twelve, Jackson began dealing narcotics when his grandparents thought he was at after-school programs. He also took guns and drug money to school. In the tenth grade, he was caught by metal detectors at Andrew Jackson High School. He later stated, "I was embarrassed that I got arrested like that... After I got arrested I stopped hiding it. I was telling my grandmother [openly], 'I sell drugs.'"..!!!!
On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police searched his home and found heroin, ten ounces of crack cocaine, and a starter gun. He was sentenced to three to nine years in prison, but managed to serve six months in a shock incarceration boot camp where he earned his GED. Jackson said that he did not use cocaine himself, he only sold it. He adopted the nickname "50 Cent" as a metaphor for "change". The name was derived from Kelvin Martin, a 1980s Brooklyn robber known as "50 Cent". Jackson chose the name "because it says everything I want it to say. I'm the same kind of person 50 Cent was. I provide for myself by any means". 50 Cent opens up about his name: In plenty of early 50 Cent interviews, when asked about his moniker, he said it represented a change. Well, on this DVD he goes in depth about being named after one of BK's most feared stick-up kids. Both 50s have a lot in common. 50 the gangster was shot 23 times over nine different occasions. And the nine-times-shot 50 Cent the rapper says he, too, believes in getting money by any means to provide for himself, just like the street legend.
50 Cent the gangster's life: The documentary goes through the gamut of the original 50's life, starting with his early days when he robbed everything from liquor stores to rappers and people at parties. Surprisingly, with all the chaos he caused, 50 was only 5 feet 2 inches tall. DJs Eric B and Scratch are among those giving testimonial interviews.
The murder of the original 50 Cent, and the shooting of 50 Cent the MC: The documentary tells the story of how the original 50's exploits caught up to him and he was ultimately shot several times in a project hallway. That was only the beginning, though, of the events that led to his death. "Infamous Times" also takes another look at what happened to 50 the MC when he was shot in Queens in front of his grandmother's house. Although 50 doesn't speak too much about the identities of those who shot him, the DVD gives its own theories and even shows a picture of one of the alleged assailants. (For more on 50 Cent, check out the feature "All Eyes On 50 Cent: The Sequel").....!!!!
Born in the South Jamaica section of Queens, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson has lived in New York City all his life. Raised by his grandparents after his father ran out and his mother was shot when he was only eight. Growing up, the Queens rapper originally wanted to be a heavyweight boxer, but eventually fell back on rapping. DJs had taken it upon themselves to release two Best of 50 Cent mix CDs, before he had even signed to a major label. 50 Cent hit the scene with "How To Rob An Industry Nigga" and he's been on a rampage ever since dealing with bootleggers, label back stabbing and other platinum selling artists trying to get at him physically. In 1999 his album Power of the Dollar, was heavily bootlegged and Trackmasters/Columbia never released it. Supposedly, Trackmasters weren't comfortable with him being caught up in the streets and getting shot three days before filming the video for "Thug Love," (with Destiny's Child) -- his first single. 50 was shot nine times that night, two shots hitting him in the head, the bullet that struck his face he carries as a reminder of what happened. That event led to the fall out with Columbia and negotiating his release from their grasps. He still showed love and rhymed over a Trackmasters produced remix of "I'm Gonna Be Alright" on J-Lo's latest album, but rivals at Murder Inc. had 50 cut from the track which could have launched the rapper. This all changed in one night when Eminem said on a radio show that "50 Cent is definitely my favorite rapper right now, he's the only one keeping it rEal." The very next day a bidding war started on 50, ending when 50 signed to Eminem's very own label Shady/Aftermath. 50 Cent's fame has exploded, being produced by Dr. Dre and Eminem and finally making his debut album "Get rich or Die Tryin'." 50 has full access and advantage of the streets through mix-tapes; that's his forum because he controls it. 50 Cent is the most anticipated artist of 2003. It's well deserved because he's "been patiently waiting."!!!
These days "50 cEnTZ" is the most famous gangster style singA in the woRld, heZ thE rEal rAppEr whO gOt nAtural cApabilities to rAp like A gAnsgsTeR.....!!! #1 on GOOGLE.com
http://www.kohit.net/
50 Cent is premiering his latest album “Curtis” exclusively on his MySpace profile today, letting all of his 900,000 “friends” get a first listen to the album before it’s released in stores. You have from now until Tuesday, when the album hits stores, to check out the album in its entirety here.
In conjunction, MySpace TV will also debut a series of five exclusive interviews with 50 Cent, each video at 10 minutes in length. What should be fun for fans is the feud going on between 50 Cent and Kanye West, who’s album is also being released on Tuesday, September 11th. MySpace looks to be happily fueling the rappers’ battling fire, as it’s offering this exclusive premier deal with 50 Cent while also featuring Kanye West as a guest curator on the MySpace Music Channel to promote his album as well.
He's cool. Dead cool
Eminem sings his praises and Mike Tyson says he's scary. But bullet-scarred rapper 50 Cent's uncompromising tales of urban life have made him America's newest star.
Kitty Empire
The Observer
His sculpted face gazes out at the world from the cover of his album, a likeness replicated on fly-posters around the country. If you look carefully, you can see an irregularity in his cheek, where a 9mm bullet dislodged one of his teeth. The image invites US to linger on the rapper's body. His torso is muscular and alive with tattoos. The shot cuts away at the former boxer's waist, concealing his hands; the skin on his right is puckered by the impact of another bullet. There is more scar tissue on his thighs, where a further seven projectiles once lodged. Then there is the stab wound. It required only a few stitches, unlike the fortnight in hospital that the volley of lead consigned him to, almost two years ago.
The rapper 50 Cent doesn't normally go around topless. Each day when he gets up, this moving target puts on a bullet-proof vest. He goes by the name 50 Cent, but is reportedly insured for $5 million. That figure may well have gone up since his album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin', debuted at No. 1 in the US Billboard charts last week. The CD is designed to look like a target, artistically spattered with gunshots. One of its standout tracks, 'Many Men', choruses: 'Many men/Many many many many men/ Wish death 'pon me'.
The album's release date in the US was brought forward to beat the bootleggers. Few records in recent memory have been more hotly anticipated than this one.
With the global music industry in a state of sharp contraction, the excitement around 50 Cent is doubly heightened: the business badly needs new stars to pull it out of the doldrums. And whatever 50 Cent's skills on the microphone - and they are considerable, his dry, matter-of-fact rhymes displaying a keen wit - his debut is backed by two of the most powerful men in hip hop, Eminem and Dr Dre.
Eminem sang 50 Cent's praises last year, and soon 50 Cent was signed to his Shady Records imprint and Dre's Aftermath stable, raising interest in the Jamaica, Queens native to unprecedented heights. And at the Brit Awards on Thursday, Eminem was seen wearing a 50 Cent T-shirt in his acceptance speeches via video.
If 50 Cent is the biggest news in hip hop, he is also the biggest news in pop music. In recent years, hip hop has become synonymous with pop, as the genre's commercial success has consistently filled charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Through sheer sales volume, and the blanket impact of breakbeats and lyrical flow, the stars of rap - Nelly, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Eminem and Dr Dre - have become some of the most powerful forces the pop world has known. In its first week Get Rich Or Die Tryin' became the fastest-selling debut by any artist in any genre in the US, with more than 872,000 sales; this week, it's up to 1.7 million. And it's not just America. Barring a last-minute post-Brit Awards rally by smooth-cheeked former Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent's album will be declared this week's highest-selling album here, too. When his next single, 'In Da Club', is released on 10 March, he will be inescapable.
But 50 Cent is also an artist, and the tale of how this 'Dead Man Walking' (as Q magazine dubbed him) came to be pop's most wanted as well is fascinating and complex. Inevitably, his rise will reignite the moral panic about hip hop and guns, black music and the glorification of violence - kindled not long ago in this country by So Solid Crew - especially if he follows Eminem to the UK in May for live shows. The high-profile success of an artist so nakedly fearsome as 50 Cent throws into relief once again the value hip hop puts on 'the street' and how its posturing blurs the line between fact and fiction.
50 Cent's story is a horror story, and at the same time a redemption song, of sorts. When asked what his name means, he has said, 'change'.
Twenty-six-year-old Curtis Jackson's father was largely absent from his childhood; his crack-dealing mother was killed when he was eight. He gradually inherited her business, doing $5,000-worth of business a day, hiding vials of crack in his trainers; he was arrested the day he wore the wrong pair to PE class. And so began a life of detention and recidivism depressingly mundane for its regularity in African-American urban communities. But after a spell in prison in 1994, Jackson decided to try to make it as a rapper. Like boxing, hip hop is a time-honoured escape route from the underworld, followed by luminaries such as Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and even the arch-Svengali Dr Dre.
In 1996, 50 Cent befriended veteran Jam Master Jay, a founding father of hip hop whose Run DMC transmuted the music of the ghetto into the new rock'n'roll in the Eighties, well before gangsta rap's rise. He taught Jackson how to count bars, construct songs. 50 Cent eventually landed a deal with the production outfit TrackMasters and Columbia Records in 1999. The deal was for $250,000 and 50 Cent got an advance of $65,000. He gave $50,000 to Jay, $10,000 went on legal expenses, and the remaining $5,000 was spent on crack. This spell recording for Columbia resulted in an album, The Power Of A Dollar, which was much bootlegged but never released.
The best hip hop has considerable humour, a fact rarely grasped by its detractors and the more pedestrian gangsta rappers.
'He makes these little jokes - he's a really funny MC,' says Touré. 'The major gangsta error was deadly seriousness: "I'm gonna kill you, I'm so mad, I can't even keep the skin on my bones!" Over time you got guys that could be deeply funny about it. Jay-Z is really witty about the gangsta experience. So is 50 Cent, in the things he says on record, and the things he says in interviews. When he was stabbed, he told the New York Times that it was no big deal, his baby's mother stabbed him worse than that.'
One track that did make it out of the Columbia sessions fuelled the underground notoriety that would eventually make 50 Cent such hot property.
The mischievous underground hit 'How To Rob (An Industry Nigga)' fantasised about relieving many of hip hop and R&B's biggest names - Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, Bobby Brown, Mariah Carey, Will Smith, even Mike Tyson - of their copious riches. 'I'll snatch Kim and tell Puff, "you wanna see her again?/Get your ass down to the nearest ATM",' it needled. Intended to cause maximum uproar, the polemic brought lyrical reprisals from Jay-Z, among others. 'I'm about a dollar/Who the f--k is 50 Cent?' he bristled, and, in so doing, inflated 50 Cent's stock even further.
The song is also said to have earned 50 Cent a beating from the Wu Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah.
He may have begun to make a name for himself, but 50 Cent hadn't exactly made many friends. About the same time, hip-hop megastar Ja Rule was also robbed, reputedly by an acquaintance of 50 Cent's. This incident sparked a still-burning feud with Ja Rule, his label, Murder Inc, and Murder Inc boss Irv Gotti that may have resulted in 50's stabbing in early 2000. Then, one day in May 2000, an unknown gunman pumped nine bullets into Curtis Jackson and left him for dead. It was three days before 50 Cent was due to shoot a video with Destiny's Child for what would have been his major label debut single proper, 'Thug Love'. Soon afterward, as he recovered, Columbia and 50 Cent parted ways.
Undaunted, 50 Cent and his partner, Sha Money, set to work putting out their own mixtapes and bootlegs. Gradually, with his grassroots profile at an all-time high, the talk about rap's newest threat became deafening, and overtures from record labels began in earnest.
The bidding war escalated when Eminem flew 50 Cent out to California and spent an evening excitedly quoting 50's lyrics back at him. Eminem's mentor and the original presence behind gangsta rap, Dr Dre, came on board, and the deal (for a reputed $1million) was done. With it, Eminem and Dre bought themselves the biggest thing since, well, Eminem, cannily neutralising the commercial threat of an even bigger public enemy than Slim Shady by bringing him on side. The money didn't make Curtis Jackson immune to tragedy, though. His mentor Jam Master Jay, a man who shunned violence, was gunned down in his studio last October. The crime remains unsolved, but Jay's friendship with 50 Cent may have made him a target. After Jay's murder, 50 Cent was placed under police protection. More recently, the offices of 50 Cent's managers, Violator, were sprayed with bullets. '
If hip hop loves a gangsta, it loves a martyred gangsta even more. Dead rappers sell extremely well. Tupac, in particular, has had at least three successful posthumous albums. It is testament to the adoration that hip-hop's poet laureate garnered in life, but also shows how a bloody end can frame and reframe a body of work. There is a touch of the Tupac about the marketing of 50 Cent, visible in the enthusiasm for his torso - Tupac's 'six-pack' was also often in evidence.
That is not to imply that his record company wishes him dead, although it would be interesting to know how much unreleased work 50 Cent has recorded. But the threat to his life is rEal, and one he can't do much about except wrap heavy metal around his torso every day. As he puts it on 'Gentlemen': 'If you shoot me, you're famous/If I shoot you, I'm brainless.'
But on Get Rich Or Die Tryin' , in 50 Cent's ascent to fame, there is something of a street opera. The jousting match between the themes of life and death, of mortality and survival, in hip hop is an intricate and mesmerising one - and one that has found an especially absorbing performer in 50 Cent.
50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin' - Life's On The Line
Send "Life's On The Line" Ringtone to your Cell 
Nobody likes me
Nobody likes me, but that's okay
Cuz I don't like y'all anyway
...And I don't like y'all anyway
Fuck all y'all!!
My watch talk for me, my whip talk for me
My gat talk for me
BLAT! Wutup homie
For bitches who don't know me
...They wanna blow me cuz the shit I floss wit sayin a lot for me
I came into rap humble, I don't give a fuck now
Serve anybody like niggas who hustle uptown
Coke price go up, cats is come down
The D's run in my crib, I'm nowhere to be found
The bitch who hustle for me, they dont even stash tracks
They keep it on em, right there in they ass crack
When I don't like a nigga, I don't pretend to
I'll have the paramedics wrap your fuckin head like a Hindu
Look, I ain't goin nowhere, so get used to me
OG's look at me and see what they used to be
I'm that nigga that sold coke, the nigga that sold dope
The nigga that shot Dice when he broke to So So
The thug, they pop shit
The thug that pop clips
The thug that went from three and a half to whole bricks
Nigga ain't in his right mind, goin against me
My picture's painted through words that make a blind man see
[Hook]
Scream murder! (I don't believe you!)
Murder! (Fuck around and leave you!)
Murder! (I don't believe you!)
Murder, murder! (Your life's on the line!)
Y'all niggas don't want no parts of me
I'm tryna figure out how y'all started me
Make me catch her on the late night
Pop shots wit the fifth and slide off wit the six
I'm not a marksmen while spark issue, I spray random
Not a pretty nigga but my moms think I'm handsome
I hate to hear "He say, She say" shit
Unless he say she say she on my dick
It's no coincidence, niggas who fuck wit me get shot up
I do a Cali style drive by and tear ya block up
You soft through, be puttin up a crazy front
I stay wit the Mac, cuz niggas tried to blaze me once
In the hood they be like, "Damn, 50 really spitted on em"
"You heard that shit?" "Yeah, 50 really shitted on em"
Beef, you don't want none, so don't start none
You just a small player in this game, play a part son
[Hook]
These cats always escape reality when they rhyme
That's why they write about bricks and only dealt wit dimes
Leave it to them, and they say they got a fast car
Nascar, truck wit a crash bar
And TV's in the dash, pa
See em in the five wit stock rims, I just laugh, pa
I catch stunts when I ain't tryin
I ain't lyin, I sit Don P til I split up
Keep my rent split up
Get outta line, I get you hit up (Wooo!)
Now if you say my name in your rhyme, watch what you say
You get carried away, you can get shot and carried away
Now here's a list of MC's that can kill you in eight bars:
50, umm Jay-Z and Nas
I'ma say this shit now and never again
We ain't buddies, we ain't partners and we damn sure ain't friends
The games you playin, you get killed like that
Actin like you all hard, you ain't built like that
See me when you see me nigga, one
(One)
[Hook]
Y'all niggas don't want no parts of me
I'm tryna figure out how y'all started me
You gon make me catch her on the late night
Pop shots wit the fifth and slide off wit the six
; "FIFTy cEnTs thE rEaL gAngStA")
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![Song "Bring It On" from album "Dance Hall Dreams [live]"](http://www.weblo.com/music/images/albums/full/Dance_Hall_Dreams_[live]_4906854e4098e.jpg "Song \"Bring It On\" from album \"Dance Hall Dreams [live]\"")
