![]() The acumen of rappers such as 50 Cent lies partly in gratifying the fantasies of middle-class teens who would faint if confronted by a firearm. In any case, hip-hop's mainstream appeal has never depended on any real overlap between the lives of its creators and those of its (mostly white, suburban) consumers. Are you afraid of even thinking of the possibility that you could overcome the same things he overcame?" "So Fifty was shot? Well, you know, some day both you and I are going to die! It's the same reality for all of us. Greene, whose standard manner in conversation is that of a man imparting uncomfortable truths to an otherwise namby-pamby and self-deluding world, puts it more bluntly. ![]() What about the fear you feel going into a new relationship? It's still fear." Even in the more traditional lifestyles – what you might consider complete normalcy – you'll find parallels to what we're talking about. (Slashing someone's face with a razor is liable to cause offence.) Still, on the book's central theme, the conquest of fear, he can speak with some authority: he was orphaned at eight when his mother was murdered, has been jailed for selling crack, and was once shot nine times at close range through a car window. From the perspective of the reader, the applicability of Fifty's advice isn't always evident: his way of dealing with a diss from a fellow artist may not translate well to the office, while his former methods for asserting his authority as a dealer are almost certainly best avoided. The result of Greene's encounter with Fifty is a book, The 50th Law, a manual on power similar to the works of Machiavelli or Sun Tzu, only with more anecdotes drawn from the crack trade. Given Fifty's lucrative public image as a gangsta, this is an awkward discrepancy – and, judging by how often he mentions it during our interview, something that preys on his mind. For his part, Greene expected a thug, whereas in reality 50 Cent, whom everyone calls Fifty, is a quietly-spoken 34-year-old with an infectious grin who hasn't been a thug for some time. Greene is a wiry, slightly nerdy guy with a goatee who wears a backpack and looks younger than his 50 years. They have known each other since 2006, after Greene received word that 50 Cent wanted to meet to discuss a potential collaboration. "He was absolutely not who I thought he'd be," 50 Cent says when I meet the two at the New York office of the rapper's unpleasantly named management company, Violator. Greene's godlike wisdom, along with his historical references to everyone from Napoleon to Nietzsche, prompted his hip-hop followers to imagine a certain kind of person: elderly, suave and learned – perhaps even dead for several centuries. 50 Cent, in particular, seems to have experienced Greene's writing as divine revelation: "You know how, no matter how you're feeling, you can go find a passage in the Bible that feels like it was written for that moment? It was like that." ![]() Greene's unsentimental view of humanity, which has made his books bestsellers, chimed with their experiences of urban hardship and the dog-eat-dog music industry. W hen the rapper and former drug dealer Curtis Jackson first laid hands on a copy of a vaguely sinister self-help book entitled The 48 Laws Of Power, he says, "I related to it immediately." The book, by Robert Greene, is a coldly amoral compilation of rules for winning life's wars – "Never outshine the master" "Pose as a friend, work as a spy" "Crush your enemy totally" – and it seized the imagination of many hip-hop artists, including Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z and Jackson, better known as 50 Cent. ![]()
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