As distressing as some people may find 50 Cent’s lyrics or nihilistic themes, he’s a Billboard, Hollywood and Madison Avenue star, as close as our generation has to a Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Joe Namath or Michael Jackson.
That said, he prefers to compare himself to mentor Eminem. “I’m at the stage he was at during The Marshall Mathers LP,” he told me during a recent interview. By that measure, Curtis has its work cut out for it. Mathers was a commercial and critical juggernaut, succeeding because Eminem still had something to prove. What, you may ask, does Fiddy still have to accomplish? Perhaps kill people, if you take him at his word on “Man Down.” Its frighteningly catchy refrain (“I’ll murder them, I’ll murder them”) burrows into your ear, the keys are pretty, and it climaxes nicely. But whereas on Mathers’ “Kill You” Em immediately lets you know that he’s killing you because he’s crazy, “Man Down” never really provides a motive. It’s hard to believe 50 would kill anyone these days; it would be bad for business.
Oddly for a gangster album, Curtis is simply too light and breezy to take seriously. That’s not to say there aren’t choice tracks. “I Get Money” and “Ayo Technology” are winning singles, the former with its techno backdrop and the latter because of Justin Timberlake’s fluttering vocals, which work even better than usual in contrast to 50’s atonal bark. The other singles, “Straight to the Bank” and “Amusement Park” are derivative of earlier 50 songs, so thankfully album cuts like “All of Me” and “I’ll Still Kill” pick up the slack.
One suspects that 50 isn’t quite crazy enough to make an album like Mathers. That’s certainly not the worst thing in the world.
50 CENT
Curtis
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