Review Summary: Thug rap's painful goodbye
The summer of 2007 was an exciting time for mainstream hip-hop. 50 Cent's
Curtis found itself unexpectedly locking horns with Kanye West's
Graduation after the latter artist pushed his album's release date to September 11, the same day 50 was to drop what would be his third studio album. After getting shot at
nine times and even recovering from his wounds here in Northeast Pennsylvania, 50 began his meteoric ascent. His 2003 debut
Get Rich or Die Tryin' helped return gangsta rap to the vanguard of mainstream popular music, anchored by its iconic, Grammy-nominated lead single "In da Club."
50 was certainly going to be a formidable foe, and he even claimed that if Kanye moved more discs than him, he would stop putting out solo albums, though he quickly walked this back. When the two albums went head to head,
Graduation came out on top, opening to sales of almost 1 million, whereas
Curtis barely tallied two thirds of that. The long-term effect of this showdown meant hip-hop would abandon the glamorized violence of gangsta rap and embrace the emotional, avant-garde pop rap that Kanye was pioneering.
Curtis became a swan song for its genre, but was it an emphatic one?
The lyrics are rote almost to the point of being flanderized, and the performances are sometimes bullish and even archaic. Opener "My Gun Go Off" interpolates Eminem's "Lose Yourself"; even a sped-up variation of that song's guitar riffs makes up the chassis of this one. Akon sings the main hook on "I'll Still Kill" and his flaccid vocals don't exactly sell the otherwise dark and swaggering themes of murder and violence. "I Get Money" has a pulse, but its monotonous and hackneyed writing holds it back. 50's dull flows on "Ayo Technology" leave the door open for Justin Timberlake to slide in and body the f*ck out of the chorus. "Follow My Lead" immediately tries to capitalize on the sensual romanticism of its predecessor, but with gross, whiter-than-Casper's-taint Robin Thicke taking the reins on this one, he spoils this shimmering, key-driven ballad. Elsewhere, 50 settles into familiar tropes of fast cars, drugs and guns on "Fully Loaded Clip" and closes the fifty-five minute and change affair with the nominally danceable "Touch the Sky."
It's not hard to see why
Graduation not only outsold this album, but played a large part in displacing this brand of rap from the forefront of mainstream consciousness. The former album is stunningly ambitious.
Curtis, shiny production and all, is reclusive and even kind of artless. You can't talk about this genre without throwing 50's name out there. For a fleeting while, he was one of the game's top dogs, but he got supplanted by a new breed of rapper, one that didn't need to sell cocaine at the age of 12 to be taken seriously. 50 certainly didn't pretend to be something he wasn't. His genesis on the New York concretes is something a lot of artists ("studio gangstas" as they're sometimes called) falsely claim to have experienced. But being nothing more than what he was is ultimately what made the duel between
Graduation and
Curtis a watershed moment, and one where the latter project rode its subgenre off into the sunset with more of a whimper than a bang.
