50 Cent looks back at his chart rivalry with Kanye West
G-Unit mogul 50 Cent has had many feuds over the years. However, Kanye West doesn’t quite make that long list. Although Fifty and Ye had a battle, it wasn’t about the streets, diss tracks, or aggression. Instead, the two faced off in a contest regarding record sales.
By 2007, 50 Cent and West were two of the biggest hip-hop artists in the world, and they had already proved they could make chart-topping albums. Still, the MCs represented two very different rap music styles and had distinct images.
Fifty was known for his thuggish, rugged aesthetic with a matching sound. The sonics of Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ and The Massacre were hard-hitting, aggressive and highly ominous. On the other hand, Kanye was known for being the artsy, eccentric hip-hop kid who made more wholesome, soulful music.
That said, in 2007, the two prepared to release their respective albums, Graduation and Curtis, on the same day, pitting two hip-hop giants against each other to see who could amass the most sales in the first week. From a marketing perspective, it was ingenious, but it was also interesting for fans because the result was not obvious in the lead-up to the releases.
In a recent interview, during which he was asked about his face-off with West, 50 Cent spoke about that period in time and how he sees it in retrospect. The ‘In Da Club’ rhymer celebrated it and highlighted how it benefitted hip-hop, stating to Billboard, “We made the highest sales week for hip-hop culture, doing that and being competitive. People that were participating as fans were buying more than one copy of it, because of the competitive side of it.”
Cent continued to explain how Graduation was the album that made Kanye a big player in hip-hop and that he was never trying to dampen his flame, elaborating, “When you look at it… we had to stand together to face off, but we never had an issue. That was his “break” album that broke him in. If I was trying to combat that, I would’ve went on tour with him. I would’ve had all of the material with the albums that worked ahead of [Graduation] to draw from while he had that one record.”
The Billboard journalist described the battle, recalling, “It represented two sides of rap back in 2007, with 50 being the street dude making hit records and Kanye’s representing the high-fashion with a different production looking for stadium status.”
In response to the question, Fifty asserted that, at that point in time, the establishment wanted Kanye’s kind of hip-hop more and insisted that they didn’t like aggressive, stating, “Anything that was less aggressive. Look at The College Dropout, or the themes of his records versus Get Rich or Die Tryin‘, The Massacre and Curtis. Those albums were a lot more aggressive, but they gave him all the trophies. They would rather hip-hop be what he was at that point.”
Following his battle with Kanye, Fifty only went on to release one more album Before I Self Destruct before pivoting to business ventures. On the contrary, Kanye went on to release seven more records and stamp his place in hip-hop history.