Starting out with a reputation as just a talented rapper, 50 Cent also became known for always giving back. He is shown performing at “A Night for Vets: An MTV Concert for the BRAVE.”
Curtis Jackson III returned to street hustling, but soon realized he needed to change his ways following his nearly two-year stint in the drug-rehab program. To begin that change, he decided he needed a new name. His close friends and family knew him as “Boo-Boo,” but that nickname certainly wasn’t one that would earn him any street credibility. So he chose to call himself “50 Cent.” Over the years, Jackson has given two different explanations as to why he chose the nickname. The first, he told Time magazine, was because “[I]t was a metaphor for change.” The second, he said on several occasions, was in honor of a New York City robber named Kelvin Martin, whose nickname had been “50 Cent.” Whatever the real reason, the nickname stuck. Forever more, he would be known as 50 Cent, or sometimes “Fiddy,” “Fifty,” or “50.”
Starting out with a reputation as just a talented rapper, 50 Cent also became known for always giving back. He is shown performing at “A Night for Vets: An MTV Concert for the BRAVE.”
50 Cent started working out religiously after his release from rehab, and he also began to mess around with rap music. He soon gained a reputation as a talented rapper, performing his street-influenced, drawling rhymes at parties and other small-time social gatherings. He enjoyed rapping, but it didn’t appear his talent for the craft was going to take him anywhere. That is until around the time of his twenty-first birthday.
That year, 1996, 50 Cent was introduced to Jason Mizell, aka Jam Master Jay, the DJ for the groundbreaking hip-hop group Run-D.M.C. A decade earlier, Run-D.M.C. had been the most successful rap group in the world. When 50 Cent met him, Jam Master Jay was running his own record label and signing and developing talent for it. Jam Master Jay saw something he liked in 50 Cent, and agreed to help him, too. He taught 50 Cent a lot not only about the music industry, but also about music itself.
“[H]e taught me about song format,” 50 Cent told AOL Music. “I didn’t even know how to count bars till I got around Jam Master Jay.”
Jam Master Jay is one of the biggest reasons that 50 is where he is today. Unfortunately, Jam Master Jay lost his life during a recording session at his studio on October 30, 2002.
Jam Master Jay eventually signed his protégé to his record label, Jam Master Jay Records. He took 50 Cent into a music studio for the first time and let him rap on a single from a group he was producing named Onyx. Jay and 50 Cent worked together for a couple years. “I had recorded over an album’s worth of material while I was under Jam Master Jay,” 50 Cent told Billboard magazine in 2003. “[But] his touring schedule with Run-DMC had become so hectic that he wasn’t able to focus on me at the time, so I moved on.”
The aspiring rapper’s personal life was hectic at the time, as well. He was now a father. On October 13, 1997, his girlfriend, Shaniqua Tompkins, had given birth to a boy the young couple named Marquise. His son’s birth, 50 Cent told The Independent in 2004, marked the beginning of the end for his hustling ways: “Going to jail in those days wasn’t much of a deal, because I had no one to take care of but myself. My little boy changed everything.”
The songs 50 Cent had recorded with Jam Master Jay soon helped get him noticed by other producers. Among those producers were two men who called themselves the Trackmasters. The Trackmasters—Jean-Claude “Poke” Olivier and Samuel “Tone” Barnes—were well known in the rap industry. They had produced hit records for all the era’s top hip-hop stars, including Nas, R. Kelly, and Jay-Z. The Trackmasters liked what they heard from 50 Cent, and decided to help get him signed to Columbia Records. The label sent the aspiring rapper to a New York studio, where he recorded dozens of songs that were to be the basis for his debut album, Power of the Dollar.
The song “How to Rob” can be viewed as a stepping stone for 50 Cent when it comes to stirring up problems. 50 performs with former G-Unit member The Game (left).
The forthcoming album’s debut single, “How to Rob,” featured 50 Cent rapping about how he was going to rob several of the days’ most popular entertainers. Those entertainers included Jay-Z, actor Will Smith, and boxer Mike Tyson. The song was included on the soundtrack to the movie In Too Deep, and was praised by the few critics who bothered to review it. Those who were listed as robbing victims on the song, however, did not like it. Some even fired back at 50 Cent in their own songs. Most wondered who he was because they had never heard of him. 50 Cent said the song was intended to be a joke, but also that there was some seriousness to it, too. He told Rolling Stone magazine, “When robbery’s not out of the question, it’s kinda easy for a song like that to fall into your thought pattern. Bigger artists have bigger diamonds. Kids in the hood is looking at the TV, going, ‘Damn it, look at that [stuff] he got on!’ Rappers have egos, so I was anticipating them being upset. But I didn’t care, ’cause it had been a year since the deal with Columbia, and I’m still selling crack.”
The publicity for “How to Rob” helped the song crack the top 100 songs on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart. 50 Cent’s second single, “Rowdy Rowdy,” did not make any of Billboard’s charts, and neither did his third release, “Thug Love,” which featured a chorus sung by Destiny’s Child.
But 50 Cent still had momentum and had built a bit of a name for himself. He had three singles under his belt, and a major-label deal with Columbia Records waiting to be signed. It seemed as if he had the world at his fingertips. But the nine bullet wounds he received while seated in a car in the front of his grandparents’ house in Queens on May 24, 2000 derailed his opportunity. It sent him to the hospital, ruined his deal with Columbia, and left him at the lowest point in his life that had been filled with low points.
One of those low points had come two months prior to the shooting, when 50 Cent was stabbed by those associated with a rival hip-hop group outside a New York recording studio. The incident was believed to be related to 50 Cent’s longtime rivalry with a rapper from Queens named Ja Rule. The shooting incident, 50 Cent said, made him reevaluate his life.
“Being shot isn’t as bad as not knowing what you are going to do with your life,” he told The Independent. “If you send a person back to where I’m from with no direction, then you sentence them to death or to killing somebody. He’s gonna be involved in something he ain’t supposed to be involved in.”
No longer with a record deal, 50 Cent began recording songs on his own and selling them as mixtapes—underground recordings released independently of a record label. Those mixtapes resulted in a huge buzz and the eventual release of the album Guess Who’s Back? The album eventually hit number 28 on Billboard’s top 200 chart and sold nearly a half-million copies.
By that time, 2002, twenty-seven-year-old 50 Cent had connected with several business and musical partners, including Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo, with whom he formed the hip-hop group G-Unit. The smooth-flowing 50 Cent was becoming well-known in hip-hop circles, and the biggest break of his career was just around the corner.