nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
infact 50 cents a visual phenomenon inne?
its all about that bullet riddled finely tooled body, thats his selling point, thats what he sells through computer games - witness his first video - return from surgery of some sort at a secret lab in the desert
interesting as it implies two things, life saving surgery, or the kind of creation of a man-machine, or a frankenstein, course dre and the slim shady are watching proceedings.
He later went on to do a video game called 50 cent - bullet proof. He also endorsed george bush after katrina. He also launched a dietry supplement!
the rest of he video is all birds and bubbly though.
I agree with this, definitely. That is exactly what the early 2000s crop of billboard charting hip-hop artists is about. 50 Cent is to hip-hop what Sylvester Stallone is to the Italian-American community in film industry. After you have the mythical "gangster" of a certain ethnicity built up in American culture, it's not too long until you have these gigantic, chiseled "man-machine" type of representations of these gangsters popping up everywhere.
As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with that. The idea that black people are only supposed to be represented in the media as the downtrodden but wisened sage who is above commercial concerns who should only speak to what is "edifying" in humanity--that's called the "mammy myth." I believe that, first, this is a dangerous sort of glamorization of poverty where the idea is that black people exist only to teach white people lessons about why materialism is bad, and second, it's very condescending and aims to deny black people the same right to make nonsensical commercial fluff that white people have always had.