The mixtape culture on which U.S. hip-hop thrives has been in overdrive of late with an ongoing feud between Eminem and Source magazine co-owner and emcee, Benzino, encouraging a string of increasingly imaginative disses to be traded between the two. It's hurt neither career but has prompted Benzino's magazine to run editorials which question the dominance that Eminem holds over mainstream hip-hop and just why it is that his nasal style has translated into such phenomenal sales.
Meanwhile, the mixtapes have featured more and more cuts from an artist that was dropped by Columbia and then picked up by Eminem's Shady imprint (along with Dre's Aftermath) for $1million. 50 Cent comes pre-packaged for U.S. hip-hop stardom, having paid his mixtape dues, reportedly been shot an alarming number of times and, last but by no means least, having the support of the genre's two foremost powerbrokers, Dre and Eminem. In its first, truncated, week on shelves this album broke sales records. Listening to the above average 'gangsta' concoctions of 'Get Rich...' European audiences may well find themselves forced to ask quite what it says about America in 2003.
Let's start with that cover: we see an image of 50, all sinuous muscle and macho threat, pictured through a window shattered by a bullet. Then there's the fondness for the click and snap of guns as chambers are loaded and shots let off throughout this casually malevolent record. Add to this a sprinkling of misogyny and the dull repetition of violent threat and it begins to add up to Dr Dre's most cynical concept since N.W.A..
Then there's hip-hop's insistence on refusing to allow Biggie and Tupac to pass away peacefully. As Eminem rightly points out, 50 Cent's dopey flow is equal parts Biggie and 'Pac with a little Big L (presumably a tribute to his talent for freestyle) thrown in for good measure. It leads to a frequently uncomfortable fit when the stripped back steely menace of Eminem's beats try to find some chemistry with a style that apes artists always best paired with the crackling funk loops of producers like Easy Mo Bee.
50 Cent's skills are better suited to the nagging digi-loops of inevitable smash single 'In Da Club', the steel drum roll-out of 'P.I.M.P.' and '21 Questions' - perhaps the track most like something that you might have found Tupac or Biggie at work on in their prime. And, even if it is against your best instincts, you'll find these and plenty more like them hard to resist. Likewise, his tendency to half-sing choruses adds charm and pathos respectively to the lazy style of 'U Not Like Me' and 'Many Men'.
By rights Dre's latest project would sit in the shade of recent albums from Common, Talib Kweli, possibly even Nas, but these are indeed dark times to which hip-hop's response appears to be divided roughly into two camps: that of otherworldly transcendence and soulful psychedelia or the stark brutality on offer here. To those in the later camp, 50 Cent represents a street survivor who miraculously pulled through an incident in which he took no less than nine bullets, his legend cementing right there in the ambulance. Even if you're of the former camp, you may just find that, as 50 says, you'll "love it way more than you hate it."
