You know what it is? It’s something that happens organically. Hip Hop, as an artform, is slowing down. It’s slowing down because they can’t actually position the records. It takes six-to-eight weeks to position a record as a hit in the minds of Hip Hop music consumers at radio. It’s now taking 12-16 weeks. It’s tougher for you to get a song to them, ‘cause it’s taking them twice as long to get a song in their face. They’re not sure that that’s the record they got to have. It’s there as a gradual process. What happens is…now we’ve got other ways to expose ourselves to entertainment. If it comes on the radio, go to YouTube, if there’s not a video, there’s a slideshow. You’ve got to figure out a way to get in their face and really perform for them.

It’s almost like, “Okay, I’m not getting the response I want. Let’s just start over. Let’s re-evaluate the situation and see what we would do, right now, if we were launching for the very first time.” We do the mixtape circuit, cool. Let’s take it up a step and do videos for every single song on the entire first mixtape. I shot the “Make Me Feel Good” video in my house, ‘cause I have a green screen room now. It had a lot of girls in it; females are no problem getting them to come. We shot and edited it, and it was done for $500 and I owned everything: lights, cases, cameras, everything. We got that out of the way, then I realized it had been viewed over a million times. This is more effective than all of the other shit we’ve been doing.

DX: Perfect segue. Looking at the massive success of ThisIs50.com, do you think in a year or two from now, every artist who can, will try to have their own megasite?
50: They’re gonna attempt, some of them, and not actually have what it takes to keep the site functioning. They look, and they make the false start, and then nobody’s really into you anymore – on that level. The majority of the time, your first impression is your last impression. If it’s a strong enough impression the first time, you can become someone respected. If not, then who cares about you?

I didn’t come to destroy someone’s business. My attitude with ThisIs50.com was to create a platform that allowed me to market and promote myself to the world in one time. Everything that I released commercially, like “Rider Part 2,” those would reach my international markets three months later. When I leave this week and I go to New Zealand, Australia and Africa, that stuff would be random material that they didn’t get their hands on. Because of ThisIs50.com, the LEDs is gonna play ThisIs50.com, and they’re gonna have access to Elephant In The Sand and all those things, for free, now.

DX: It sped everything up.
50: Right. It takes the guy in Germany, Kosovo, Dubai, India, Croatia – they’re already aware of it. When you put the tape up, you watch the site activity just jump through the roof.

DX: I look at N.W.A. and The Geto Boys. Both groups had internal controversy. Both groups thrived without radio play. Both groups gave identities to regions. Does G-Unit fall in line as the east coast evolution of that kind of group?
50: Hell yeah. Even if you look at those groups, from The Geto Boys and N.W.A., N.W.A. would be the best comparison – not only because of their aggressive content, but because of the success of the artists as individuals, away from the actual group. They’re actually the only group to have multiple artists from it become platinum artists, consistently. The Geto Boys are respectfully The Geto Boys; we love Scarface, but there were other people involved in that group that have yet to have projects [reach the kind of solo success seen by N.W.A.].
LB: Willie D and Bushwick [Bill].
50: On a personal level, with artists as individuals, G-Unit has accomplished something that only N.W.A. has. That’s because of greatness. You had Ice Cube. You had Dr. Dre. You had The D.O.C., you had some shit goin’ on! It was ahead of what was actually goin’ on that time. They actually created gangsta rap, pretty much. They came with that type of content. It was dangerous.

DX: Individually, you guys are platinum, global superstars. As a group, how much is G-Unit, although successful worldwide, intended for Queens?
50: It is. But you know what it is? It’s the mentality. We’ve got to reflect on something in order to create the movie or the actual record. What excites us musically, is what would have excited us then. Descriptions in music come from the experience where we come from. Even the word choices are gonna come from the environment. If you’re somewhere where they say, “What up, dun?” Queensbridge say “dun.” The Bronx say “moe.” Philly say “bol.” In the A it’s “shawty.” There’s certain slang that’s gonna come from that actual environment. We may use pieces of different slang just to be different, but you’ll find that those [word] choices [largely] reflect where we come from. “I’m the mechanic, I use the hammer to fix shit / I be on that sick shit / Come close, spit clips.” [In Queens], they’ll say, “Yo son, I got that hammer on me now.” That’s where I’m from. “The mechanic” was the perfect metaphor. Or “I’ll make a movie outta him.” That was slang that was goin’ on within our circle, in the street.
TY: “Oh, this nigga’s a movie, son!”
50: You see? They started shooting, they made a movie, they tried to killed him.
TY: Some Jet Li shit. Some shit you’ll only see in the movies. [Laughs]
50: See, we’re taking what we have and introducing it to a song structure. The [listener] might not have it, ‘cause they don’t come from where we come from. [A guy we grew up with] was Face. Face was cousins with Treach from Naughty By Nature.
TY: Gray door.
50: [50 says address in Queens] had a spot with a gray door. It was a little party house. We all had shit we would do. [50 Cent and Tony Yayo wave their hands back and forth] “Ho! Hey! Ho! Hey!” It turned into “Hip Hop Hooray.” When he played it for Treach, he heard it [and borrowed it]. At the time, there was no real music savvy to us; we wasn’t writing anything. That was just some shit we was doin’ in the nightclubs. But when [Treach] got exposed to it and heard it, he was already in a position to where he could take something like that and turn it to an anthem. He added to it. He made that energy from right that. That shit came out of “the gray door” on 109. Continued on page 4 »