The classic 50 Cent beat Nas passed on: “He just fell out of love with it”
50 Cent has had many classic records throughout his career. Songs like ‘In Da Club’, ’21 Questions’, ‘PIMP’, ‘Candy Shop’ and ‘Just a Lil Bit’ instantly spring to mind as some of his biggest hits. It’s also hard to imagine his legacy without ‘Many Men (Wish Death)’, which was almost the case.
The song was a highlight on his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, released in 2003, and continues to receive its flowers today. Produced by Eminem, Six Figga Digga and Luis Resto, the iconic song finds 50 addressing his haters and near-death experiences.
On the memorable hook, 50 raps, “Many men wish death upon me/ Blood in my eye, dog, and I can’t see/ I’m tryin’ to be what I’m destined to be/ And n*ggas tryin’ to take my life away.”
However, Nas’ former A&R Lenny ‘Linen’ Nicholson revealed that the Queensbridge rapper had access to the beat first and even wrote and recorded vocals for the track. Around that period, Nas released God’s Son in 2002 and Streets Disciple in 2004.
“‘Many Men’ was a Nas track first — he actually vocalled it,” Nicholson said for Mass Appeal’s oral history of The Lost Tapes. “He was developing another artist named Nashawn … he had to massively impress Nas. If Nas started something, he would add his vocal to it and see if Nas would be impressed enough to keep it. [Nas] didn’t finish that track… that was a track that he just fell out of love with.”
He added, “At that time, 50 was looking for something just to stay busy and to keep writing. I gave it to 50, and it turned into ‘Many Men’.”
Funnily enough, ‘Many Men (Wish Death)’ almost didn’t make the final tracklist for Get Rich or Die Tryin’, but not because of anything to do with Nas. 50 felt that it sounded different to the rest of the album, but Dr Dre persuaded him to include it.
“The only song that almost didn’t make that album was ‘Many Men’, and it was because of the tempo,” he said on Big Boy’s Neighborhood. “It was slower than the other records, and I wanted to keep everybody up. And then Dre was like, ‘Nah, that gotta go [on there], you gotta keep that one.’ And then we put it [on], and that was the end of it.”
The track’s popularity surged in 2024 following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people editing the song over clips of the US president. 50 reacted to the song going viral on Instagram, posting an edited version of his Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album cover with Trump’s face instead. He wrote in the caption, “Trump gets shot, and now I’m trending.”
‘Many Men (Wish Death)’ is certified three times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The song has almost 700 million streams on Spotify, with the music video racking up nearly 600 million views.
50 once toured with Nas during the early days of his career and praised him for his intelligence. “He was ahead of us,” he told XXL. “What he had, and I was looking at it going, ‘You gotta be careful,’ because he was smarter than the music he was releasing.
“He was smarter than things he was saying on the records because what he said on the records matched how things felt in the environment not who he was actually [in his head]. We’d be on the tour bus, and he’d be reading books and stuff.”