The huge song Dr Dre didn’t want on 50 Cent’s ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album
50 Cent released his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, in 2003. The record included some of his career’s biggest tracks to this day and remains an iconic part of hip-hop history. However, Dr Dre, who released the project through his Aftermath label, was against including one song that became a huge hit.
Dre was the brains behind multiple songs on the album, including ‘In Da Club‘, ‘Heat’ and ‘Back Down’, but it’s fair to say he was wrong about ’21 Questions’. Produced by Dirty Swift of Midi Mafia, the track reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and six on the UK Singles Chart.
During an appearance on Big Boy’s Neighborhood in 2023, 50 opened up about Dre not wanting his Nate Dogg-featured record, which is now considered a classic hip-hop song, on the project. He believed 50 was trying too hard to land a hit.
“He said, ‘I don’t know why you want?’ Why I wanted the record,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Damn, I gotta do all these muthafuckin’ push-ups?’ Dre would say this is NWA… ‘We didn’t do that.’ Like, they didn’t have to reach to make a commercial record or anything that sounded like a commercial record. And that’s just in his DNA. Like on his path, he’s like, ‘We don’t need that.’”
Dre couldn’t understand how a love song would fit into his persona, but 50 was keen to show two sides of himself. “Dre was, like, ‘How you going to be gangster this and that and then put this sappy love song on?’ 50 told Newsweek in 2005. “But I told him, ‘I’m two people. I’ve always had to be two people since I was a kid, to get by. To me, that’s not diversity, it’s necessity.’”
Speaking to Ari Melber on MSNBC, 50 explained that he made ’21 Questions’ to help his love life. “[Dre] said, ‘I know what this is. It’s NWA with just one member and you really don’t need it,’” he said. “He didn’t know why I wanted to put the record on.”
Breaking down why he included it on the album, he said, “Because I wanted ladies to feel like maybe they could fix me, and I had done so many push-ups. So I felt like, ‘This is gonna be good for my love life!’ I’m dead serious.”
He added, “I thought that they would see some way that they could possibly fix me or understand me in a different way. And their favorite line on the song was, ‘I love you like a fat kid loves cake.’ When I wrote it, I was thinking, I love you, but too much of you is no good for me. Like a fat kid loves cake.”
’21 Questions’ is one of 50’s most significant records alongside ‘In Da Club’, ‘Candy Shop’, ‘P.I.M.P.’ and ‘Just a Lil Bit’. The track, which contains elements of Barry White’s 1978 song ‘It’s Only Love Doing Its Thing’, spent four weeks atop the Hot 100 and 23 weeks in the top 100. The music video boasts over 661 million views on YouTube, which helped him become YouTube’s most-streamed New York rapper of 2024.