The first song 50 Cent ever released: “Writing hit records since 1997”
In the early 2000s, it might have felt like 50 Cent came out of nowhere to instantly become a global superstar. But before he found mega-fame with the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in 2003, he had been plugging away at his music career for many years.
Before he started taking his music seriously, 50 was famously a teenage drug dealer, having gotten into that game aged just 12. It was only after his arrest in 1994 that things started to change. He served six months of a sentence that could easily have been much longer, and, when he got out, he started to develop his rapping skills.
50 used to spend time in the basement of his friend’s house, where there were some turntables set up. Here he used to practice his rapping over instrumental tracks, and, by 1996, he was beginning to move in more established musical circles. That was the year he was introduced to Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC.
Run-DMC had been among the most important hip-hop groups to emerge during the 1980s, meaning that Jam Master Jay, the group’s DJ, was about as close to hip-hop royalty as it could get. He took the young 50 under his wing and showed him how to write, rap and make music.
By 1998, 50 Cent was taking his first steps towards becoming a public figure. That year he featured on the Onyx song ‘React,’ which marked his first official credit on music released to the public. Jam Master Jay had been pivotal in getting 50 involved with the track.
In the book From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside, Queens, 50 highlights Jay’s role in setting him up with Onyx. “At the time we did a song, no one expected it to be a single,” he wrote. “They just put me on the song as a favor to Jay because I was the new n—a in his camp.”
But while his guest appearance on ‘React’ is generally understood to be the first time that 50 Cent appeared on an official song, he had recorded music before that. He and Jam Master Jay even made an album together, with Jay on production duties.
It was around this period that Jay helped 50 Cent to put together a song called ‘The Glow,’ which, while barely remembered today, was actually 50 Cent’s first single. It was released in 1997, a year before his appearance on that Onyx track.
On the 92 Bricks Instagram page, a post was made to highlight the release of ‘The Glow’—and 50 himself commented on it. Shedding some light on his mindset at the time, he explained that the song was specifically crafted with radio audiences in mind. Radioplay was essential to success in those days.
“I been writing hit records since 1997,” 50 posted in his comment, before elaborating on how different the music business had been back in the ’90s. He wrote that an artist had to “make shit that felt like it could play on radio.”
He ended his comment by crediting the experience of making radio-friendly records like ‘The Glow’ as a key step towards his eventual dominance of the airwaves throughout the 2000s. “If I didn’t learn to make records like this,” he wrote, “I would not have dominated when I came in ’03. But this was my first dubplate.”