Five years after the meeting and the Mercedes and the Nets jersey, 50 was poised to be the biggest rapper in the world. That April, he announced his return with a mixtape called Guess Who’s Back? that collected new work, hits from past mixtapes, and songs from his shelved Columbia album. (At 19, I bought a Benz, I did / The older niggas really wasn’t feeling the kid.) Then, starting in June, he dropped a trio of mixtapes, just months apart from one another, and announced a deal with Shady/Aftermath. He became a fixture on those little MTV News segments they squeezed in between TRL and Made. The first and best of those three mixtapes, 50 Cent Is The Future, is not only a staggering show of pop instinct and raw charisma, but a durable blueprint that lasted well over a decade.

Just weeks after the last of those tapes, God’s Plan, hit bootleg blankets and DSL modems, a masked man broke into JMJ’s studio on Merrick Blvd in Queens and shot him in the head, killing him instantly.

The murder is still unsolved, but immediately after the death was reported, rumors took hold that it was in some way retribution for JMJ’s relationship with 50 Cent. Those whispers were so pervasive that you wound up with absolutely unbelievable things like this item from Entertainment Weekly, which asks if the killing was revenge for 50’s “parodies of other rappers’ songs” and “lampooning of gangsta rap.” Of course, nobody who knew anything thought this — the song at the center of the rumors was “Ghetto Qu’ran,” which is about as straightfaced as a rap song gets — but the fact was they hit a tipping point where writers at EW were feeling around in the dark for context clues, all before an album was out.

ADVERTISEMENT

By the time 50 Cent was a global superstar, the myths and archetypes that formed the bedrock of his image had been deeply embedded in the public consciousness. This was after crack and after 9/11, after Big and Pac were killed, and after Puff strong armed his way into everyone's’ living rooms. A lot of the early writing about 50 casts him as a magnetic, efficient take on familiar molds. But the truth is that, even by the standards of late-capitalist America, 50’s life had been unbelievably, almost impossibly harrowing. (That the story of the son of a murdered, single mother whose rise to the peak of the entertainment industry could elicit shrugs is both horrifying and unsurprising.) And yet 50 did not win by making you believe you could be him — he was scowling and sarcastic, bulletproof and ready to die. He was the future.