 Hip-hop heavyweight also reiterates that Curtis was a 'dud,' hopes to reclaim his mixtape supremacy. Last week, 50 Cent called his latest LP, Curtis, a "dud" via video blog. On Wednesday at his Connecticut mansion, he said the world heard him correctly, and he's not afraid to admit it. Read the article and watch the video now.
"It was," he said at his office, located directly one floor above two clubs
he has in the house. He built Club TKO to showcase singing, dancing and DJing,
while the other club has a stripper pole, swing and catwalk stage tailor-made
for another kind of dancing. "It was a blockbuster that I lit, and it
didn't explode. I felt like it should have went a lot further than the results I
received. Publicly, I feel that 50 Cent fans don't believe it was a dud. It did
have 'I Get Money,' it did have 'Ayo Technology,' 'I'll Still Kill,' 'Follow My
Lead' with Robin Thicke. These records were hit records, but the timing they
came out was wrong. If the first record you heard off Curtis was 'I Get
Money,' it would have shifted more millions in sales."
Another mistake 50 admits to making is not the material he released on the
LP, but the songs that didn't come out in advance of it. He strayed from his
realm of ruling the mixtape circuit. He didn't put out a street release until
late 2007, well after Curtis came out. He chalks that up to following bad
advice from Interscope.
At his mansion, 50's musical rejuvenation is contagious. In his basement
studio, Tony Yayo and Lloyd Banks stand out among the small crop of Fif's
friends listening to cuts from the long-in-the-works G-Unit group album,
tentatively titled Lock and Load.
50 only reveals one song title, "The Party Ain't Over," which features all
four of the core Unit members, including Young Buck. Sonically, it appeals to
your inner-hooligan, recalling the evaporating thump of "I Get Money," with Fif
and company boasting and denouncing talk of the group's demise. There's another
track on which 50 jokes that he doesn't care if his enemies fall off a building.
Later, he played a Swizz Beatz-produced track, obviously named "Down" (trust us,
the chorus says it all), on which 50 gloats about getting busy on the mic. Yayo,
of course, is the most energetic, frequently dancing with his arms extended
horizontally like airplane wings. A record called "Liar, Liar" features 50
telling a girl everything she wants to hear, knowing full well he's less than
sincere.
"I created monsters," Fif would say during a quieter time upstairs in his
office about his fellow G-Unit rappers. "Frankensteins. I got three of them.
It's like creatively they got strong opinions on things they like. ... They'll
be telling each other, like, 'Yo, I'm telling you.' They got a different way of
saying it to each other than saying it to me. They be like, 'Nah, he be saying
we need to keep this record.' ... I think their solo careers changed what our
collaborations were in the beginning. If you look at the beginning of the
mixtapes, I was creating the hooks."
50 is excited to get the G-Unit album out, but he's not going to rush it.
He's back on the mixtape scene with three street CDs since last fall and another
one, with DJ Drama, coming in the next few weeks. He says with so many wolves in
the studio, creating material hasn't been a problem.
"You should be amazing on the album," he declared about working with so many
other individuals. "You don't have to write three verses. All you have to do is
one. You should write three and pick one. I'm like, 'You're a solo artist
right?' I'll tell them to redo the verse [if it's not up to snub]. 'Just do it
again. Let's see what the second one sounds like if we're not sure.' They don't
mind. The process is interesting because they've developed their own personal
liking for things they want to do. But the response to the mixtape material —
which has proven to them they should listen — is making them follow what I'm
saying."
By Shaheem Reid via MTVNews.
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