The difference between 50 Cent and Curtis Jackson
For his third album, released in 2007, 50 Cent decided to get personal. The record was largely about 50’s life before fame, before he became known by his famous stage name. In those days, he was just Curtis Jackson—hence the album’s title, Curtis.
In order to get into the right headspace for the album, 50 visited important places from his past while he was writing it. As he explained to Spin in the months before the album dropped, this helped him to recall what life was once like.
“I wrote and recorded lyrics for this album at my grandmother’s house again,” he said. “I went back in the basement, where you have to bend down the ceiling is so low, where I wrote Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Being in that environment helped me remember things. I had to dig deeper.”
50 Cent’s life changed dramatically following the release of his first album, which brought him earth-shattering success. That made it difficult, years later, to think back to his old life, before fame and fortune, back to when he was still just Curtis. This exercise of writing in his grandmother’s house helped.
50 was specifically hoping to tap into “those points where I was more vulnerable. After I’ve been a success, there hasn’t been that much vulnerability for me.” Before his 50 Cent persona took over, the young Curtis lived with struggles and anxieties, and he wanted to bring them to the fore for this new album.
“When I was ten years old, my mom had already passed, and I’d get into physical altercations,” he recalled. “I’d get jumped. To me, after my mom passed, everything, literally, that went wrong, went wrong because she wasn’t there. If I wanted to go to the park, and it would start drizzling, it was happening because my mom wasn’t there—because everything good came from her.”
50 suggested that the aggression that is present in his personality as an adult derives from his early experiences of being beaten up. He uses that aggression for his musical persona. “50 Cent is the aggressive portion of Curtis,” as he put it.
He believes that, because of the dark nature of 50 Cent’s music, people think that the real man is “darker” than he actually is. But Curtis Jackson, as he explained, is more complicated than that.
“That’s why I enjoy film projects,” he said, “because they allow me to show emotions that I don’t normally show through my music. Hip-hop is such a competitive art form, so anything you put out that makes you vulnerable, puts you in danger, because other people are gonna use those statements and things against you, to discredit you later.”