Greg Tate on 50 Cent

I think Greg actually likes this album more than most heads, who find the hooks lacking compared to GRODT from what I see and hear. Beyond that I won't editorialize right now:

Married to the Hook

In The Paranoid Style in Hiphop's SuperSlave Economy: A Study in Beef (Routledge, 2009), Siadya Rose-Hampton Sharise writes, "So this is where we at Black people? Shooting each other down in the streets like mad dogs? Over battle rhymes? Are you flucking kidding me?" Earlier Rose-Hampton Sharise writes, "Hiphop been dead as a folk culture but that's OK. Because while that death by hypercapitalism signifies a loss of masscultural access to the best poetic and political imaginations of the current twentysomething generation, that death also points us to exactly where we want to go: right on top of 50 Cent's ass. I swear Boo, in some of those videos 50 looks like a homo-thug and that's OK too."

Now I'd go a step further and say 50 more resembles a homo-thug dyke. Because generally speaking the girls flip the homo-thug look in public with more flair than their male counterparts. The wifebeater, the Tyrolean hat, the brown Popeye biceps, and the white silk pants? Yall all know yall more likely to see that girl strolling around Bed-Stuy dragging her supermodel than that guy so don't you even try and test me. Now this might all seem rather provocative until you check out The Massacre and 50 has homoerotic musings of his own, as in, "I read somewhere I'm homophobic/S**t, go to the hood/There's mad n*gg*s on my d**k." The Massacre is unlikely to decrease 50's bounty of swarming Y chromosome carriers. It is hands-down the most diabolically sensous collection of baby-making gangsta music since Pac's All Eyez. Like Pac, 50 is a ruffian who knows the value of a good pop hook; he embraces the hook, caresses the hook, is married to the hook. He also respects the ancient pop rule that if you get the women the men will come. Every lyric on The Massacre that's not about violating a nigga is about sexing pimping or mindf**king a babe—or, in the most notable instance, about 50's pique at being sexed pimped and mindf**ked by Viveca.

Be all that as it may, if you need real MC'ing the way 50 needs real love then you got to love 50 no matter what dumb sheet he's going on about now. Mostly for the dry wit of his richly melodious country con-man flow alone. On The Massacre 50 remains the definition of laconic, sardonic, harmonic, and moronic...