The 50th Law (8 page)

Hood Alchemy

IF ONE IS CONTINUALLY SURVIVING THE WORST THAT LIFE CAN BRING, ONE EVENTUALLY CEASES TO BE CONTROLLED BY A FEAR OF WHAT LIFE CAN BRING.

—James Baldwin

For well over a year 50 Cent had been working on what was meant to be his debut album,
Power of the Dollar
, and finally in the spring of 2000 it was ready to be released by Columbia Records. It represented to him all the struggles he had been through on the streets, and he had hopes that it would turn his life around for good. In May of that year, however, a few weeks before the launch date, a hired assassin shot nine bullets into him while he sat in the back of a car, one bullet going through his jaw and nearly killing him.

In a flash, all of the momentum he had built up reversed itself. Columbia canceled the release of the record and dropped Fifty from his contract. There was too much violence associated with him; it was bad for business. A few inquiries made it clear that other labels felt the same—he was being blackballed from the industry. One executive told him flatly he would have to wait at least two years before he could think of resurrecting his career.

The assassination attempt was the result of an old drug beef from his days as a dealer; the killers could not afford to let him survive and would try to finish the job. Fifty had to keep a low profile. At the same time, he had no money and could not return to street hustling. Even many of his friends, who had hoped to be part of his success as a rapper, started to avoid him.

In just a few short weeks he had gone from being poised for fame and fortune to hitting the bottom. And there seemed no way to move out of the corner he found himself in. Could this be the end of all his efforts? It would have been better to die that day than to feel this powerlessness. But as he lay in bed at his grandparents’ house, recovering from the wounds, he listened a lot to the radio, and what he heard gave him an incredible rush of optimism: an idea started taking shape in his mind that the shooting was in fact a great blessing in disguise, that he had narrowly survived for a reason.

The music on the radio was all so packaged and produced. Even the tough stuff, the gangsta rap, was fake. The lyrics did not reflect anything from the streets that he knew. The attempt to pass it off as real and urban angered him to a point he could not endure. This was not the time for him to be afraid and depressed, or to sit around and wait a few years while all of the violence around him died down. He had never been a fake studio gangsta and now he had the nine bullet wounds to prove it. This was the moment to convert all of his anger and dark emotions into a powerful campaign that would shake the very foundations of hip-hop.

As a hustler on the streets Fifty had learned a fundamental lesson: Access to money and resources is severely limited in the hood. A hustler must transform every little event and every trifling object into some gimmick for making money. Even the worst shit that happens to you can be converted into gold if you are clever enough. All of the negative factors now facing him—little money, no connections, the price on his head—could be turned into their opposites, advantages and opportunities. That is how he would confront the seemingly insurmountable obstacles now in his path.

He decided to disappear for a few months and, holed up in various friends’ houses, he began to re-create himself and his music career. With no executives to have to please or worry about, he could push his lyrics and the hard sounds as far as he wanted. His voice had changed as a result of the pieces of bullet still lodged in his tongue—it now had a hiss. It was still painful for him to move his mouth, so he had to rap more slowly. Instead of trying to normalize and retrain his voice, he determined to turn it into a virtue. His new style of rapping would be more deliberate and menacing; that hiss would remind listeners of the bullet that had gone through his jaw. He would play all of that up.

In the summer of 2001, just as people had begun to forget about him, Fifty suddenly released his first song to the streets. It was called “Fuck You,” the title and the lyrics summarizing how he felt about his killers—and everyone who wanted him to go away. Just putting out the song was message enough—he was defying his assassins openly and publicly. Fifty was back, and to shut him up they would have to finish the job. The palpable anger in his voice and the hard-driving sound of the song made it a sensation on the streets. It also came with an added punch—because he seemed to be inviting more violence, the public had to grab up everything he produced before he was killed. The life-and-death angle made for a compelling spectacle.

Now the songs started to pour out of him. He fed off all the anger he felt and the doubts people had had about him. He was also consumed with a sense of urgency—this was his last chance to make it and so he worked night and day. Fifty’s mix-tapes began to hit the street at a furious pace.

Soon he realized the greatest advantage he possessed in this campaign—the feeling that he had already hit bottom and had nothing to lose. He could attack the record industry and poke fun at its timidity. He could pirate the most popular songs on the radio and put his own lyrics over them to create wicked parodies. He didn’t care about the consequences. And the further he took this the more his audiences responded. They loved the transgressive edge to it. It was like a crusade against all the fake crap on the radio, and to listen to Fifty was to participate in the cause.

On and on he went, transforming every conceivable negative into a positive. To compensate for the lack of money to distribute his mix-tapes far and wide, he decided to encourage bootleggers to pirate his tracks and spread his music around like a virus. With the price still on his head, he could not give concerts or do any kind of public promotion; but somehow he turned even this into a marketing device. Hearing his music everywhere but not being able to see him only added to the mystique and the attention people paid to him. Rumors and word of mouth helped form a kind of Fifty mythology. He made himself even scarcer to feed this process.

The momentum now was devastating—you could not go far in New York without hearing his music blasted from some corner. Soon one of his mix-tapes reached the ears of Eminem, who decided this was the future of hip-hop and quickly signed Fifty in early 2003 to his and Dr. Dre’s label, Shady Aftermath, completing one of the most rapid and remarkable turnarounds in fortune in modern times.

The Fearless Approach

EVERY NEGATIVE IS A POSITIVE. THE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO ME, I SOMEHOW MAKE THEM GOOD. THAT MEANS YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING TO HURT ME.

—50 Cent

Events in life are not negative or positive. They are completely neutral. The universe does not care about your fate; it is indifferent to the violence that may hit you or to death itself. Things merely happen to you. It is your mind that chooses to interpret them as negative or positive. And because you have layers of fear that dwell deep within you, your natural tendency is to interpret temporary obstacles in your path as something larger—setbacks and crises.

In such a frame of mind, you exaggerate the dangers. If someone attacks and harms you in some way, you focus on the money or position you have lost in the battle, the negative publicity, or the harsh emotions that have been churned up. This causes you to grow cautious, to retreat, hoping to spare yourself more of these negative things. It is a time, you tell yourself, to lay low and wait for things to get better; you need calmness and security.

What you do not realize is that you are inadvertently making the situation worse. Your rival only gets stronger as you sit back; the negative publicity becomes firmly associated with you. Being conservative turns into a habit that carries over into less difficult moments. It becomes harder and harder to move to the offensive. In essence you have chosen to cast life’s inevitable twists of fortune as hardships, giving them a weight and endurance they do not deserve.

What you need to do, as Fifty discovered, is take the opposite approach. Instead of becoming discouraged and depressed by any kind of downturn, you must see this as a wake-up call, a challenge that you will transform into an opportunity for power. Your energy levels rise. You move to the attack, surprising your enemies with boldness. You care less what people think about you and this paradoxically causes them to admire you—the negative publicity is turned around. You do not wait for things to get better—you seize this chance to prove yourself. Mentally framing a negative event as a blessing in disguise makes it easier for you to move forward. It is a kind of mental alchemy, transforming shit into sugar.

Understand: we live in a society of relative prosperity, but in many ways this turns out to be a detriment to our spirit. We come to feel that we naturally deserve good things, that we have certain privileges due to us. When setbacks occur, it is almost a personal affront or punishment. “How could this have happened?” we ask. We either blame other people or we blame ourselves. In both cases, we lose valuable time and become unnecessarily emotional.

In places like the hood or in any kind of materially impoverished environment, the response to hardship is much different. There, bad things happening assume a kind of normality. They are part of daily life. The hustler thinks: “I must make the most of what I have, even the bad stuff, because things are not going to get better on their own. It is foolish to wait; tomorrow may bring even worse shit.” If Fifty had waited, as he had been counseled, he would be just another rapper who had had a moment of success and then faded quickly away. The hood would have consumed him.

This hustler mind-set is more realistic and effective. The truth is that life is by nature harsh and competitive. No matter how much money or resources you have accumulated, someone will try to take them from you, or unexpected changes in the world will push you backward. These are not adverse circumstances but merely life as it is. You have no time to lose to fear and depression, and you do not have the luxury of waiting.

All of the most powerful people in history demonstrate in one way or another this fearless attitude towards adversity. Look at George Washington. He was a wealthy landowner but his attitude towards life had been forged by years fighting for the British in the French and Indian War, amid the harsh environment of frontier America. In 1776, Washington was made supreme commander of the American Revolutionary army. At first glance this position seemed more like a curse. The army was a semi-organized mob. It had no training, was poorly paid and outfitted, and its morale was low—most of the soldiers did not really believe they could succeed in defeating the all-powerful British.

Throughout 1777, British forces pushed this weak American army around, from Boston to New York, until by the end of the year Washington had been forced to retreat to New Jersey. This was the darkest moment in his career and in the war for independence. Washington’s army had dwindled to a few thousand men; they had little food and were poorly clothed, during one of the bitterest winters in memory. The American Continental Congress, fearing imminent disaster, fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore.

Assessing this situation, a cautious leader would have chosen to wait out the winter, muster more troops, and hope for some change in fortune. But Washington had a different mind-set. As he perceived it, his army would be considered by the British as too weak to pose any threat. Being small, his army could move without the enemy’s knowledge, and launch an attack that was all the more surprising for coming out of nowhere. Moving to the attack would excite the troops and gain some much-needed positive publicity. Thinking in this manner, he decided to lead a raid on an enemy garrison in Trenton, which proved to be a great success. He followed this up with an attack on British supplies at Princeton. These daring victories captivated the American public. Confidence had been restored in Washington as a leader and the American army as a legitimate force.

From then on, Washington waged a guerrilla-style war, wearing out the British with the great distances they had to cover. Everything was turned around—lack of funds and experience led to a more creative way of fighting. The smallness of his forces allowed him to torment the enemy with fluid maneuvering over rough terrain. At no point did he decide to wait for more troops or more money or better circumstances—he went continually on the attack with what he had. It was a campaign of supreme fearlessness, in which all negatives were converted into advantages.

This is a common occurrence in history: almost all great military and political triumphs are preceded by some kind of crisis. That is because a substantial victory can only come out of a moment of danger and attack. Without these moments, leaders are never challenged, never get to prove themselves. If the path is too smooth, they grow arrogant and make a fatal mistake. The fearless types require some kind of adversity against which they can measure themselves. The tenseness of such dark moments brings out their creativity and urgency, making them rise to the occasion and turn the tide of fortune from defeat to a great victory.

You must adopt an attitude that is the opposite to how most people think and operate. When things are going well, that is precisely when you must be concerned and vigilant. You know it will not last and you will not be caught unprepared. When things are going badly, that is when you are most encouraged and fearless. Finally you have material for a powerful reversal, a chance to prove yourself. It is only out of danger and difficulty that you can rise at all. By simply embracing the moment as something positive and necessary you have already converted it into gold.

Keys to Fearlessness

[I]N NOOKS ALL OVER THE EARTH SIT MEN WHO ARE WAITING, SCARCELY KNOWING IN WHAT WAY THEY ARE WAITING, MUCH LESS THAT THEY ARE WAITING IN VAIN. OCCASIONALLY THE CAL THAT AWAKENS—THAT ACCIDENT WHICH GIVES THE “PERMISSION TO ACT—COMES TOO LATE, WHEN THE BEST YOUTH AND STRENGTH FOR ACTION HAS ALREADY BEEN USED UP BY SITTING STILL; AND MANY HAVE FOUND TO THEIR HORROR WHEN THEY “LEAPED UP” THAT THEIR LIMBS HAD GONE TO SLEEP AND THEIR SPIRIT HAD BECOME TOO HEAVY. “IT IS TOO LATE,” THEY SAID TO THEMSELVES, HAVING LOST THEIR FAITH IN THEMSELVES AND HENCEFORTH FOREVER USELESS.