I remember sitting underneath the Scarface poster in my college dorm room when it happened. Ten years ago, as the Internet buzzed with the news that Soulja Slim was killed, I remember thinking to myself -- wait what, so what he said in his music wasn't an act?
His real name was James Tapp, and James Tapp apparently really did live in a world of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, and guns?
So I downloaded some of James Tapp's albums. If you ain't got the dream team then you ain't winning your case; I get all up in your face and call you a straight house n****; I know you gonna press charges on me; Whip my pistol all in your mouth, n****. Alright. I went back to Notorious B.I.G. instead.
The best storytellers speak with conviction. Hemingway advised on this: write only what you know. It's the only way you can talk about it with the force of conviction. Readers don't need to be educated to know when a storyteller is full of shit; most of us can sense it pretty early on. The words are hollow, the sentences aren't building something substantial, the story isn't pushing to the point with any true urgency. Listen, look -- we're distracted creatures with not a lot of time; we sure as shit are not giving our time to anything that doesn't demand it.
Hemingway understood this. He knew that forceful writing is generated from the conviction of having lived through the subject. He drove an ambulance in World War I, was a journalist in the Spanish Civil War, ran with the bulls and drank with the bullfighters in Pamplona. So he wrote about wars, about men who were strong in the face of incredible circumstances, about bullfighting. My favorite writer, John Fante, was a poor Italian-American who moved to Los Angeles with nothing but an insatiable drive to become a great writer. His most successful book - Ask the Dust - was about a poor Italian-American writer in Los Angeles who tries to do just that.
James Tapp may have lived the gangsta life, but Soulja Slim was a boring rapper. Which brings up another point. It's not enough to have merely lived the life. You must also possess the talent to translate it to others in an entertaining way. And sometimes you need to put distance between you and yourself. You need time to examine your situation before you can really begin to write about it.
J.D. Salinger wrote about phonies, intellectuals, and swanky socialites who drank Toms Collinses. He grew up in that life; but it was the time he spent overseas in World War II that made him a great writer. He nearly never wrote about the war or what it did to him, but he did. You could feel it exploding behind his words like a thirty-ton megabomb. His writer's voice was shell-shocked, irrevocably damaged, and without it - if Salinger was never drafted or if he died like so many others in the Battle of Hurtgen forest - his stories about all the phonies and swanky socialites wouldn't be half as good. Children wouldn't be nearly as innocent or charming.
Enter Curtis Jackson III a.k.a. 50 Cent. After Curtis got shot nine times (that's five times more than 2Pac at the Quad Studios) he signed a publishing deal with Columbia Records while on his hospital bed. Soon after that, he gave us Guess Who's Back?. The album cover showed a blurry 50 Cent pointing a gun not quite directly at us. The gun crystallizes into focus in the foreground next to a Catholic cross that he holds in his hand. And you can almost see it in real life, getting stuck up by this man in some back-alley in Jamaica Queens.
Open the album in a media player of your choice and click play -- and you will be treated with 18 tracks containing the contents of that gun. He is playful, sinister, insightful, and above all, believable. You have to believe it. You have to feel it. He got shot NINE times just so you'll feel it. He brought back the truth from that insane life that he lived. There's a certain kind of electricity in most of what he says.
Want insight?
I know death is promised, I don't fear getting murked. It's when a n**** halfway kill ya homey, it hurts.
Enjoy sinister humor?
I teach n***** sign language, that ain't deaf son. CLICK CLICK - you heard that? That means RUN.
Like imagery?
Shell hit my jaw, I ain't wait for doctor to get it out. Hit my wisdom tooth, I *huck-too* spit it out.
I was happily frightened by this man before I ever saw his punishing body on the In Da Club video. Maybe the album is short on the puns and compound rhymes that mark a good technical rhymster in this day and age, but the brilliance of his album was certainly not lost on Eminem, one of the most technical rappers ever, who signed him right away.
The album still holds up today.
And yet....
While my white friends enjoyed 50 Cent, the rapper they were really beginning to love was Kanye West. Dude, come on, Backpack Rap. That Gangsta Rap shit is over. Kanye is a college kid, like us. He worked at the Gap. He grew up in middle class America. He speaks to us. He only hates White America because of all the racism that is still present in every day life, and it's not like he can unsee that shit. And you know it's there too, come on, dude, you know it.
OK.
I guess I like that song about the spaceship.
That song about the workout plan is catchy, too.
I took down my Scarface poster. And then I graduated college. And then I got an apartment near the beach. And then I got a job in advertising. Time flies.
Now, ten years later, Gangsta Rap is dead. Even 50 Cent isn't 50 Cent anymore. Now it's about fashion, funny lyrics, catchy hooks. Rappers can get away with rhyming about the sparkling things in life -- diamonds and cars and what not -- about women, because that's what they know now. Rappers these days are rich. Like, Really Rich. Kanye just bought a bullet-and-bomb-proof Hummer to transport his baby daughter. Can you blame them? Ask Jay-Z and tell you honestly. Compare the record sales between Reasonable Doubt (1.5 million) and Hard Knock Life Vol. 2 (5.4 million). Now go back and listen to those albums.
Maybe Gangsta Rap got old. Maybe the story of the young poverty-stricken boy making a name for himself by whatever means necessary grew too old to be interesting. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that authors really only have one or two moving experiences in their lives; after that, they're just struggling to find different ways to say it. Well, Kanye has plenty to say. He could talk all day. Words never stop running from his mouth. I can't relate to him.
There is a reason for this, and here it is. I'm thirty-three now, not the twenty-three year old college kid I was when I first heard Guess Who's Back? And yet, even now, when I close my eyes and fantasize, I can still dream about being a gangster, as Scarface, but I can't dream about being some poor ghetto child or some Really Rich rapper. No matter how hard I try. And that's the true purpose of a work of art. To give us a romantic escape from the workaday blues. That holds true whether you're a rap album or The Old Man and the Sea.
Maybe it's not fair to say that 50 Cent isn't 50 Cent anymore. It's not 50 who changed, but Curtis Jackson III, the young poverty-stricken boy who started selling drugs at age eleven. He may not be able to embody another Scarface fantasy on our behalf, but I doubt he cares much. He, too, is now a Really Rich man.
