The Fake Persona At The Heart of 50 Cent’s ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’

50 is phony, but not in the way you might think.

I was a bit busy last week so I didn’t get a chance to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I wanted to talk a little bit about it because it's a seminal hip-hop album and perhaps the most important album of my high school years. (Daaamn homie, you old AF!) It was only when I got older did I realize 50 was able to do so because he mostly because he embraced a fake persona—though not the one you might think. 50 didn’t fake being a gangster. That man is a gangster; he got shot, sold drugs, went to jail, etc. Instead, 50 faked the persona of what we think is a rapper.

In 2012, I embarrassed 50 Cent. Prior to doing an interview promoting The Lost Tape with DJ Drama, me and 50 were chopping it up. Unprompted, 50 was going on about the phoniness of rappers, how they pretend to be gangsters. He said rappers were liars. I retorted, “Oh come on 50, you lie too.” His eyes widened. He leaned in on me with an intimidating leer, thinking he was about school me about his felonious capers. 

“Watch this,” he said, with bulletproof confidence, to DJ Drama. He turned to me, “What I lie about?”  

So I told him.

“Your most famous song is ‘In Da Club,’ it has a famous opening lyric. ‘Go shawty, it’s your birthday, we gon party like it’s your birthday/We gone drink Bacardi like it’s your birthday.’ 50 Cent, do you drink alcohol?”  

50 put his head down and leaned back like, Damn, he got me. He thought I was going to call out street credibility, but I knew that while 50 was real in the streets, he was faking being a drinker.

I added, “You also have a song called ‘High All The Time’ but you don’t smoke weed.” He quietly nodded, acknowledging I had done my homework. Before he could go into why he’d tell those lies, I offered my own reasoning. 

“You do it for the image, it makes sense,” I said. “You do it because you know the hip-hop audience drinks, smokes, and parties and you make music for them. It’s funny cause most rappers do smoke and drink and party while they lie about being a gangster, but for you, it’s the opposite.” 

50 had a good reason to be straight edge; alcoholism and drug addiction ran in his family. On the underrated 2009 song “Days Went By,” he recounts his childhood rapping, “My Grandpa drunk, my uncle Rock drunk/My uncle Champ pump crack smoked my fuckin' stash up.” Harrowing childhood details might make for compelling album cuts though they don't exactly play well for a radio single.

“In Da Club” and “High All The Time” aren’t the only Get Rich songs where 50 convincingly plays a role. On the hit single “PIMP,” tries his hand at a personality better suited for Snoop Dogg on the remix. Pimping wasn’t actually 50’s forte, but neither was being a stick-up kid (the real 50 Cent was though), but “PIMP” and pre-fame single “How To Rob” work because we allow street credibility to be interchangeable. He sold crack, we’ll believe he sold sex. He was in shootouts, we’ll believe he’d rob someone.

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The least believable song on the album is the Nate Dogg-assisted “21 Questions.” The song finds 50—a cold-blooded hustler who would go on to diss his baby mama and one-time romantic interest Vivica A. Fox—embracing the role of a loverboy. Even executive producer Dr. Dre was skeptical about it.

“Dre was, like, ‘How you going to be gangster this and that and then put this sappy love song on?’” said 50 recently, on Big Boy’s Neighborhood. “But I told him, ‘I’m two people. I’ve always had to be two people since I was a kid, to get by. To me that’s not diversity, it’s necessity.’”

I personally never bought 50’s sappy side and assumed it was a cynical play, but he was right about necessity. He understood the things a rap album needs, he understood the image a rapper had to have. Get Rich’s tracklist is like a checklist for all the ingredients of a by-the-numbers album; a club song, a girl song, a weed song. Being “real” wasn’t the point, he had all the charisma in the world to make his antics believable and the melodic gifts to make his songs catchy—two attributes solely missing from most street rappers.

Street rappers sometimes play the character of a gangster, while 50 didn’t fake that part he did play it up to an extreme. He was marketing himself as an uber gangster, 2Pac and Biggie reincarnated except he took more shots than both and managed to survive. (Of course, 2Pac was more a gifted actor than all-out gangster). It worked because the hardest songs on the album double as true-to-life tales. 

The realest shit 50 ever wrote is “Many Men,” a tale of gunfire, bullet wounds, and revenge that still resonates today with rappers like 21 Savage and Migos. “Back Down” is a classic diss song, but unlike most rap beefs (including many of 50’s own feuds) he wasn’t beefing for the sake of publicity. His beef with Ja Rule, Irv Gotti, and former Queens drug kingpin Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff is deeper than rap. If 50 and Ja Rule ran into each other today, it’s still on-sight.

Then there are songs like “Heat,” with a beat made out of guns cocking and firing, it’s such a perfect soundscape for a gun nut like 50 it’s bizarre to think it was meant for Rakim. Even “Patiently Waiting” is autobiographical when you consider what 50 went through in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when he got shot, dropped by his label, and his career stalled as he watched similar but less talented rappers catch platinum and gold plaques. He waited for his time and everything culminated with that album, that magic moment.

It’s hard to explain the hype around that album in 2003, the only rap albums since then I could compare it to are Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III (a great album that didn’t quite live up to the hype but came close) and Drake’s Thank Me Later (a mediocre album that aged poorly and didn’t live up to the hype in the moment either). With Get Rich, 50 delivered on all fronts and gave us a perfect album because he knew what we wanted and was willing to mold himself into the perfect archetype of a rapper.