Monday, September 17, 2007

An Open Letter to 50 Cent


Dear 50 Cent,
I thought I was rooting for you in your battle with Kanye West, and in your life struggles generally, but your new single has made me realize: you are the laziest man on earth. The first time I heard your new song I assumed it was about how technology that seems to bring us closer together actually makes further apart, or something, but upon listening to it again, it turns out it’s just about how you and Justin want to have sex with a pole dancer. And you say the word “technology” a bunch. It doesn’t really make sense.
This came as a surprise, since I always had thought of you as a man who, say what people will, understood the concept of a conceit. I revisited “Candy Shop” so that I would be able to defend you. What I found was that, aside from one line where you compare your dick to a lollipop and one line where you compare your dick to M&Ms, it doesn’t have any lyrics about candy. Likewise, “Magic Stick” has very few lines about magic. Alarmingly few.
It’s not that you mix metaphors, but that you come up with a perfectly good conceit and then abandon it. What if John Donne had just started talking about some hot pole dancer in the middle of “The Flea”? We would be minus one great work of English literature. And plus one fascinating document of time travel. In the past, 50 Cent, you’ve relied on your endearingly lazy voice to meander your way into America’s heart. But this is getting out of control. Consider this your wake up call: it’s time to try. Even just, at all. Otherwise I will stop downloading your songs for free.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fun Fact: When 50 Cent was in grade school (then called Lil' Nickel) he wrote a poem about his "Glue Stick" and how it was "gonna leave you sticky", which actually won him a Allen Ginsberg Junior Poetry Award in third grade. Other hits included "My Black Crayon", "I Wanna Play T-Ball wit Chu", "Sharpen my Pencil" and "My Black Crayon (Remix)". This was all before he dropped out in fourth grade.