50 ways to leave the ghetto

THE 50TH LAW

By 50 Cent and Robert Greece

Available at Powerbooks

Prophets come in two varieties: there are the long-winded types, who speak all day long about omens and signs and will launch into parables at the drop of a hat. Then there are the silent types, like Clint Eastwood in the old Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns: they don’t say much, but when they do, you tend to listen.

According to pop psychologist Robert Greene, rapper 50 Cent is the strong, silent type who prefers to let his magnificent life struggles and utter fearlessness do all the talking. That’s probably why the book The 50th Law — ostensibly written by 50 Cent and co-written by Greene — contains all of 20 short paragraphs uttered by Fiddy himself. Think of them as “proverbs.”

The book’s title may hint that it contains mysteries and secrets akin to Dan Brown’s bestsellers, but actually it’s a self-help tome meant to guide people through their fear and uncertainty, much as the rapper has successfully navigated his.

Bound and gilded like a Gideon’s Bible, The 50th Law takes us into the power secrets of the popular rapper who rose up from crack dealer to gunned-down fledgling rapper (he took nine bullets! And lived!) to hip-hop superstah. Only in America, as they say.

Greene, whose best-selling books include The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War has examined specimens of successful living before. But this is the first time he’s taken up American hip-hop as a prime example of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story. That is, if Alger were entrepreneurial enough to sell crack rocks before being signed by Eminem.

Along the way, Greene reiterates his formulae for success in the material world — fearlessness, unshakeable sense of purpose, and war-like strategies for taking on both Hollywood moguls and gun-wielding crack den dwellers. That Greene can translate his universal principles to any self-help situation is shown by the fact that his earlier 48 Laws of Power has become a gospel of sorts among wheeling and dealing rap stars. It was Busta Rhymes, in fact, who, after receiving a special edition of that book, introduced Greene to 50 Cent (born Curtis Jackson).

Greene then reportedly spent a year traveling with the rap mogul and his entourage, gaining valuable insights into how to deal with both jealous colleagues, record company weasels and European royalty. He watched fistfights break out and saw with his own eyes Fiddy’s “utter fearlessness.” Yes, it’s really the 50 Cent Gospel According to Greene:

Fifty’s power doesn’t manifest itself in yelling or obvious intimidation tactics. Anytime Fifty acts that way in public, it’s pure theater. Behind the scenes, he is cool and calculating. His lack of fear is displayed in his attitude and in his actions. He has seen and lived through too many dangerous encounters on the streets to be remotely fazed by anything in the corporate world. If a deal is not to his liking, he will walk away and not care. If he needs to play a little rough and dirty with an adversary, he goes at it without a second thought… Coming from an environment in which he never expected to live past the age of twenty-five, he feels like he has nothing to lose, and this gives him tremendous power.

Greene sprinkles his tales of 50 Cent’s rise up from Southside Queens projects crack merchant to multi-platinum star with quotes from Henri Bergson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Miles Davis and Richard Wright. Lofty company, to be sure. In fact, he quotes the above so often you’d think they also deserve a co-writing credit.

 But it’s the brief interjections by 50 Cent himself that put all this gum-flapping into perspective. There are 10 chapters documenting 50 Cent’s business “secrets,” and each contains one or two epigrams. These tend to be short and to the point, such as:

• “Reality is my drug. The more I have of it the more power I get and the higher I feel.”

• “I was born alone and I will die alone. I’ve got to do what’s right for me and not live my life the way anybody else wants it.”

• “Every negative is a positive. The bad things that happen to me, I somehow make them good. That means you can’t do anything to hurt me.”

And so on. In other words, it’s the usual gangsta stance, reinterpreted as the gospel of better living. Not quite as memorable as The Beatitudes, but you get the message.

To his credit, Greene does draw a powerful lesson from Fifty’s life story. It’s about seeing the world in perfect clarity, not through a filter of delusions and dreams; it’s about understanding that you can move mountains on your own, with your own strength; it’s about turning negatives into positives, or lemons into lemonade. True, these messages have been dispensed in the past by people like Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, but Greene is arguably the first to recognize a business-minded rapper as a prophet of the new age.

I have no trouble accepting that 50 Cent’s business savvy is worth reporting on, and I give him props for getting out of a life of crime to where he is now. In business, success is success, whether it comes from the projects or Wall Street.

I guess I do have a problem with the way Greene’s book glorifies Fifty’s early “selling” days. Much of the book dwells on lessons Mr. Cent learned while selling crack cocaine. Granted, Fifty had to learn his business lessons not in some boardroom but in back alleys, where he taught young crack “baggers” (those who count out the crack rocks for drug dealers) how to pocket a few rocks per bag, then sell the bags “light” and deal the pilfered rocks on the side. Shrewd, indeed. I’m pretty sure they don’t teach this at Harvard Business School, but maybe they should.

I guess I would probably feel the same reaction if a self-help author chose to glorify American bootleggers in the 1920s as “business gurus” for selling illegal moonshine to the booze-starved market; or if the author applauded Philip Morris or other tobacco companies for manipulating nicotine levels to make their product more addictive. Just because Fifty happened to learn how to be a hard-line businessman selling crack, it doesn’t make it right, or admirable.

Though the book dwells on that early experience, it might have been more interesting if Greene had focused greater attention on how 50 Cent actually turned his rap — which he saw as only a small part of his larger ambition — into a global enterprise far beyond the initial “selling point” of the music. He hints that by 2007, 50 Cent felt a need to “reinvent” himself because people had accepted an image of him as “tough and menacing” (an image he himself had created) that had by then become an “elaborate trap.” But he doesn’t really explain how Fifty overcame this disconnect. Instead, he draws countless lessons from famous figures — Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart — who overcame their own fears and traps.

Indeed, the 50 Cent connection to The 50th Law seems tangential at times, as though Greene is content to repackage the rapper’s story for a business market, while cashing in on its selling power through association with this enigmatic “hip-hop and pop culture icon.”

And let’s talk about the packaging. Dressing up your book to resemble a Bible is either outrageously self-important, or meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Let’s hope Greene and Fiddy have taken the time to thank The Big Guy up there for all this shameless grandstanding. And I don’t mean Notorious B.I.G.