BOOK REVIEW: 50th LawBy 50 Cent and Robert Greene
CALL ME shallow, but everything I know about the penal system I learnt from Porridgeand The Shawshank Redemption.Likewise, my views on inner-city black America owe a huge debt to The Wire, the brilliant Baltimore-based drugs and cops series, which I hungrily consumed in back-to-back box-set chunks.
The central theme of The Wirewas the evolution of the drugs trade into a ruthlessly efficient and hugely successful business model, with its strict hierarchies and corporate rules of engagement.
With this as a primer, I then read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streetsby David Simon, The Wire'screator, followed by The Cornerby the same author.
Thanks to Simon, I feel like I’ve got an insight into life on the mean streets, given that I’m not going to be buying a house there.
The question facing me and other white, middle-class dilettantes is, do we need to know any more?
50 Cent, along with business writer Robert Greene, has written a book that we might bracket under the heading of “further reading”, offering the personal perspective of a man who’s been there and fought his way out of the ghetto, been shot, put in prison and then created a successful rap career whilst simultaneously heading up a thriving global business empire.
What is his secret, the book asks, what is the 50th Lawand why is it relevant to the rest of us, who work in the "non-street" sector?
“Understand: you need this code even more than 50,” runs an early passage. “His world was so harsh and dangerous it forced him to open his eyes to reality and never lose that connection. Your world seems cosier and less violent, less immediately dangerous. It makes you wander and your eyes mist over with dreams. The competitive dynamic [the streets, the business world] is in fact the same, but your apparently comfortable environment makes it harder for you to see it.”
The book lauds a great American business archetype, the hustler, the image of which is at the heart of 50’s public persona.
He has amassed a huge fortune, put at $150 million by Forbes, by creating and selling sub-brands that talk to the people who bought 21 million copies of his first two albums.
Hustling also underlies the business end of the drug trade, which is where 50 learnt the ropes and also where he nearly died, shot through the window of a car, when he was ironically on the verge of his first big music deal.
This incident was the most traumatic of his life, but it has since been used to crank up his gangsta credentials, offering his white suburban audience a whiff of the real stuff.
The greatest danger we face, say the book’s authors, is allowing our mind to grow soft and our eyes dull. When things get tough and you grow tired of the grind, your mind tends to drift into fantasies; “You wish things were a certain way and slowly, subtly, you turn inward to your thoughts and desires.”
The central theme is that to live life fully, we must overcome our fears and be free of emotion when it comes to manipulating others to achieve our goals.
These messages are delivered in a hectoring tone: “Your days are numbered. It takes constant effort to carve a place for yourself in this ruthlessly competitive world and hold on to it. People can be treacherous. They bring endless battles into your life. Your task is to resist the temptation to wish it were all different. Instead, you must fearlessly accept these circumstances, even embrace them.
“By focusing your attention on what is going on around you, you will gain a sharp appreciation for what makes some people advance and others fall behind. By seeing through people’s manipulations, you can turn them around. The firmer your grasp on reality, the more power you will have to alter it for your purposes.”
Greene's The 48 Laws of Powerwas similarly cold in its analysis and this feels like Greene's book, not 50's.
The rapper’s life is merely the starting point for Greene to do his day job, adding context, linking the challenges facing drug dealers to historical figures such as Machiavelli or Leonardo Da Vinci.
50 Cent’s life story is extraordinary and thankfully the book doesn’t seek to sugar coat it with a redemptive ending. There is no hint of the tiresome “journey” as told by reality TV contestants and teenage showbiz autobiographers.
His childhood experiences – his mother, a drug dealer, was killed when Curtis Jackson (his real name) was just eight years old – are truly shocking, as are the anecdotes in the book about his subsequent life as a crack dealer and street hanging thug.
But he offers up his life unapologetically and to get anything out of it, the reader has to get beyond the book’s amoral stance.
To be offended by The 50th Lawis to miss the joke.
