On February 28, a shooting occurred outside the studios of Hot 97, New York's top hip-hop station, where Queens-born rapper Curtis Jackson, a k a 50 Cent (at the moment, the genre's preeminent artist), was being interviewed. He used the occasion to publicly disown his protégé, The Game (real name Jayceon Taylor, of Compton, California), for having failed to back up his denunciations of certain other rappers. The Game, as it happened, was being interviewed just then on another local station, and a flurry of calls alerted him to the situation. Game and his gang -- their anger stoked by a taunting phone-in or two -- charged over to Hot 97, but were barred from entering the building. Another crew of men appeared, guns came out, and shots were fired -- one hitting a Game associate in either the leg or the buttocks, depending on the early report.
50 Cent quickly issued statements downplaying the seriousness of the affair, claiming media exaggeration; meanwhile, The Game was excoriating his erstwhile boss at a show in Long Beach, California. For many, the ghosts of rap stars past -- Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, representatives of rap's supposed bicoastal rivalry, and both dead by gunfire -- loomed again. But the fledgling feud was quashed on March 9, when 50 Cent and The Game shook hands at a Harlem photo op. In separate statements, both informed the press of their plans to focus on more philanthropic pursuits, such as donating money to black youth charities in Harlem and Compton.
Nearly everyone felt there was something phony to the feud, and something staged about the public handshake. Well, as they say, duh. The Game's debut album, The Documentary, has been selling by the boatload since January; 50 Cent's own sophomore effort, The Massacre, was rush released into the thick of the feud and went platinum within days. These are canny entrepreneurs in a crowded marketplace who know that pop music doesn't get across on quality alone, without hype, headlines, and an aura of heat. If it did, after all, Karl Wallinger would be five times the size of Lenny Kravitz. (Karl who? Exactly.)
Not to imply that 50 Cent and The Game don't have ideals; merely that they are pragmatic enough to know that that's not what will get them through the door. In fact, one of them says this out loud: The quality of your life, intones The Game at the opening of The Documentary, "depends on your ability to play the game. And I play the game." He does that, indeed, and little more -- there is scarcely a sound on the album to rock anyone's world or jar his or her conceptions of gangsta rap's customary limits. He shoots, he scores, next case.
The Game has made a workmanlike album that occupies inspiration's monotonal middle zone, only once or twice straying, as if by accident, into its low blue or high red regions. Though largely overseen by the estimable Dr. Dre, The Documentary lacks sonic dimensions; it honors the beat but cheats on the atmosphere. Most songs throb with a menace no longer so menacing, flex with obscenities no longer obscene. "Like Father Like Son" and "Hate It or Love It," the best tracks, succeed on chord changes and rhythmic glides that are straight out of early-'70s soul, that bottomless reserve of musical ready-mades that rap and hip-hop have been mining for more than 20 years now.
Worse -- and fatally for a "documentary" -- there is no strong personality at the center. The Game lacks a distinctive voice or arresting delivery, the ability to animate rhymes with character, or a range of emotions and inflections that would justify well over an hour spent in his declamatory presence. The sole exception to this is "Start From Scratch," in which The Game finds and sustains a tired, heartbroken rasp at the back of his throat that snags at the listener's brain at least twice every line.
It's not enough. 50 Cent, meanwhile, gives you more than enough. The Massacre, like most American pop albums in the CD age, is overblown and undisciplined. (This country has an obesity problem.) But to listen to The Documentary and The Massacre back to back is to know the difference between a minor talent and a major one; between bullish drive and brutal creativity; between playing the game and deciding, on a whim and in the instant, what the new game will be.
50 Cent can do this because he has a fecundity of ideas -- melodic, rhythmic, vocal -- and he knows which are fleeting and which are good enough to anchor a five-minute track. One juicy motif, applied with finesse and judgment, can transform a rap track from something tedious into something spellbinding. It might be (and probably has been) called the monotony principle: In a music predicated so firmly on the unvarying beat, the smallest detail -- a flare of wail or wall of echo, a piece of purloined guitar or even, yes, a well-placed gunshot -- can take on huge importance, varying the texture and renewing interest. 50 Cent uses all these sounds and more, like the repeated female cry that centers "Ski Mask Way," sounding strangled, clipped; the spiraling piano run backing "Position of Power"; the vinyl scratch behind "God Gave Me Style."
Though we note with interest the gay-ambiguous tinge on a couple of 50 Cent's rhymes -- just sketchy enough to make the homophobic part of his constituency nervous -- mostly his lyrics come from the same old book of rap folklore (he's king of this, he's master of that, women are bitches) without meaningful irony or variation. The power of The Massacre is more a matter of the musical cyclones the artist-producer sets spinning around every half-heard rhyme, his creative use of syncopated noise to destabilize everything -- not least his own omnipotence.
The Game gives you the braggart, but almost none of his paranoid double; part of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. Every one of his boasts and tales of the 'hood may be fact -- but this isn't the 1930s, we're not Stalinists, and social realism doesn't equal good art. 50 Cent, like all true artists, knows this instinctively. (True artists are also insecure -- that's where their edge comes from -- and it may say something that Cent, unlike Dre with Eminem, chose to back a protégé who is manifestly his creative inferior.) What Cent also knows that The Game doesn't, I'd like to think, is that the very best hardcore rap always exposes itself as a lie, or at best a half-truth. From the Geto Boys' “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” to Eminem's homicidal fantasies ("Stan," "Kim"), every brag and blind aggression is undercut by a mix full of demon noises and tormenting heckles, floating signifiers of fear. Even the Geto Boys' paranoia is intensified by a gracefully sinister sample of an Isaac Hayes funk guitar, circa 1974, the sound of a cool devil drifting through, collecting souls. This grade of rap breeds documentary with psychodrama, opens a surrealist trapdoor in that social-realist construction.
It doesn't hurt that 50 Cent vocalizes with the ease of a man conversing with himself in private moments; there is more character, more temperament and shading in his sleepiest drawl than in other rappers' most intense performances. He doesn't have the Geto Boys' fierce cinematic focus, nor does he approach the lethal double-edged humor of his collaborator Eminem (of whom it could be said that, though you don't always know when he's joking, you always know when he's serious). But 50 Cent delivers that same musical sense of a deranged world existing alongside or within ours, that other world of pure sound and peripheral sensation, of unseen tricksters and terrors -- and it dwarfs the egotism of his thug-loving, bitch-slapping, gay-baiting, playa-hating rhymes.
Great hooks, boisterous voices, and sexy bodies made rap the defining sound of this time, but its dynamic tension is what ensures the best of it will still be around when this time has passed. In the meantime, hardcore hype like the Hot 97 confrontation ensures merely that rap will continue to be analyzed as social pathology more than musical creativity. Which is fine, apparently, with a lot of people -- people like Jim Farber, whose March 3 New York Daily News review of The Massacre will surely circle the drain at year's end as the most moronic music writing of 2005. "Is all the hype worth it?" he asks, punning on the blood spilled at Hot 97. "You better bloody believe it." A hit-bound album trumps all else, foolish taunts or flesh wounds, and 50 Cent's music "deserves to make a killing." Hardy-fucking-har. But there's hype and there's hype; did someone really have to take a bullet in the behind for that seventh platinum certification? Such questions, Farber assures us, are for "moralists" and "outsiders."
OK, then. As an outsider with an irritating moralistic streak, I found this particular exercise in hype dumb and regressive, self-destructive and pointless, shining the wrong kind of light on two records -- one mediocre, one brilliant -- that would have gotten plenty of light without it. To the extent that a trumped-up mini-war gave two rappers an excuse to funnel money into black neighborhoods and make nice noises about their "community," it had a good result. To the extent it reinforced, however fleetingly and transparently, the lucrative stereotype of rappers as vengeful bullies lacking self-control, it was a bloodletting at the altar of the Virgin Megastore.
Either way, it was a dangerous show, and it had zero to do with talent -- except to say that The Game, on the evidence of one album, needs all the hype he can muster, and 50 Cent, on the evidence of two now, doesn't need any at all. But this being pop music in a marketplace economy, hype will happen. Just put away the guns for a while -- forever. Please.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard), just out in paperback. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
