On Tuesday, superstar rappers 50 Cent and Kanye West will square off, each releasing his third full-length album to the public.
If either of the MCs are to be believed, this is the showdown of the century – fueled by endless bravado, ridiculous drama, oddball twists and enough alpha male chest-thumping to fill the gorilla cage at the zoo.
“I’m King Kong, and Kanye is human,” 50 Cent tells Rolling Stone in its current issue, which devotes its cover to the 50-Kanye duel. “Humans run when they see King Kong, because they’re scared.”
Who will move more legal units in the first week of release? Will 50 Cent make good on his promise of retiring if West’s CD outsells his? With what alter-ego will West approach Tuesday: the fun-spirited coed, or the egomaniacal firestarter?
And will fans take ownership of their favorite artist and vote with their wallets on Tuesday, leaving the CD store feeling the same sense of pride and community involvement that goes along with exiting a polling place?
Here’s the better question: Do we really care?
It would be one thing if the MCs’ sentiment were honest. But 50 Cent saying he’ll retire as a solo performer if he’s outsold by his peer is like Alec Baldwin’s 2000 claim that he would move to Canada if George W. Bush were to be elected president. (Baldwin didn’t, and 50 Cent won’t.) This is Marketing 101, and as obvious as it is, it’s also brilliant.
“This is about the smart marketing minds of hip-hop artists,” said Erik Parker, director of content at , the site that originally broke the news of 50 Cent’s threatened retirement. “Kanye made a comment at the listening session for his record last week here in New York, ‘Now we’ll let the press do all the work.’ These artists could blow their whole (marketing and publicity) budget by doing this kind of work. It’s a classic battle between the gangsta and the school boy. Everybody’s making out, everyone wins.”
The artists will no doubt benefit from the first-week push – especially since the second-week drop-off in urban music is so pronounced. Online message boards have been full for two weeks with impassioned arguments for buying one record and not the other.
Both records leaked online last week, and anybody with a vague knowledge of locating music online can find both albums in their entirety. West’s “Graduation” is as skillfully produced as you would imagine, bending the old R&B sample-based production model and turning hip-hop on its head, yet again.
50’s junior-year outing, “Curtis,” is an all-star affair, featuring names almost as big as his: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Justin Timberlake, Mary J. Blige, Akon, Timbaland, Robin Thicke, Young Buck, Tony Yayo and Nicole Scherzinger, a.k.a. the only semi-talented Pussycat Doll.
In a way, this feud is a manifestation of safe, mainstream hip-hop circa 2007. It used to be hip-hop beefs resulted in stabbings, shootings and even deaths. But now these MCs are vying for ridiculous bragging rights – campaigning for votes like politicians running for mayor of Bizarro World.
50 Cent has called it a “friendly feud” before saying “it’s not possible for Kanye to beat me. It’s the teddy bear versus the gorilla.”
Before the dates were locked in, 50 Cent was allegedly considering calling his album “Curtis S.S.K.,” which stood for SoundScan Killer, addressing the U.S. CD sales tallying agency and the stress the rapper feels to succeed.
Amid all of the current hype, the Screamfest concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden in late August turned out to be quite the event. At one point, headliner T.I. was joined onstage by not only Jay-Z and Sean Combs – but also 50 Cent and West. After the show, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that the quintet celebrated together “like the Rat Pack” with vodka shots at the 40/40 club.
“50 showing up at that show was the curveball,” said ‘s Parker. “It showed all the fans that (this beef’s) not that deep. They’re in competition with one another, but they can still stand on the same stage together.”
But as friendly as this feud is, it’s representative of something much larger than either of the rappers’ careers. Their beloved hip-hop is in a bad place in the only realm that matters: sales. The genre is suffering more than most, down more than 40 percent since 2000 – mainly because it lacks the multiple 5 or 6 million sellers each year.
50 Cent’s first record, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” was the No.1 album of 2003 with 6.5 million copies sold domestically. Kanye’s debut, 2004’s “The College Dropout,” has made a mark by moving about 3 million copies to date. 50 Cent’s second record, “The Massacre,” took the No.2 spot in 2005 with 4.8 million copies sold – ranking second to Mariah Carey – while West’s sophomore trek, “Late Registration,” came in at No.9 that year with 2.4 million copies sold.
“My first album was the highest-selling LP of 2003,” 50 Cent says in the current issue of Rolling Stone. “That album sold something like 1.14 million in four days. Jay-Z’s last album sold something like 1.6 total. Kanye works for Jay-Z. Kanye is a worker bee. He’s never been able to generate a fraction of the interest that I have.”
But in saying that, 50 Cent is also helping hype the Kanye record. And while both of these albums will surely land in SoundScan’s year-end Top 20, it’s fascinating to see that fans are still concerned with their favorite artist’s fate.
“If I was a hip-hop star in today’s music climate, I would do all I could to get as much hype going as possible, including making all this media hype into a publicity stunt,” one fan wrote on a busy message board debating the 50-versus-Kanye battle earlier this week. “Music sales are down across the board, so these two realize that and want to be the top-sellers of the year. Either way, I’m (buying) both of their albums on Sept. 11. It’s for hip-hop.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
