Free The 50th Law by 50 Cent

the wounds, he listened a lot to the radio, and what he heard gave him an incredible rush of optimism: an idea started taking shape in his mind that the shooting was in fact a great blessing in disguise, that he had narrowly survived for a reason.

    The music on the radio was all so packaged and produced. Even the tough stuff, the gangsta rap, was fake. The lyrics did not reflect anything from the streets that he knew. The attempt to pass it off as real and urban angered him to a point he could not endure. This was not the time for him to be afraid and depressed, or to sit around and wait a few years while all of the violence around him died down. He had never been a fake studio gangsta and now he had the nine bullet wounds to prove it. This was the moment to convert all of his anger and dark emotions into a powerful campaign that would shake the very foundations of hip-hop.
    As a hustler on the streets Fifty had learned a fundamental lesson: Access to money and resources is severely limited in the hood. A hustler must transform every little event and every trifling object into some gimmick for making money. Even the worst shit that happens to you can be converted into gold if you are clever enough. All of the negative factors now facing him—little money, no connections, the price on his head—could be turned into their opposites, advantages and opportunities. That is how he would confront the seemingly insurmountable obstacles now in his path.
    He decided to disappear for a few months and, holed up in various friends’ houses, he began to re-create himself and his music career. With no executives to have to please or worry about, he could push his lyrics and the hard sounds as far as he wanted. His voice had changed as a result of the pieces of bullet still lodged in his tongue—it now had a hiss. It was still painful for him to move his mouth, so he had to rap more slowly. Instead of trying to normalize and retrain his voice, he determined to turn it into a virtue. His new style of rapping would be more deliberate and menacing; that hiss would remind listeners of the bullet that had gone through his jaw. He would play all of that up.

    In the summer of 2001, just as people had begun to forget about him, Fifty suddenly released his first song to the streets. It was called “Fuck You,” the title and the lyrics summarizing how he felt about his killers—and everyone who wanted him to go away. Just putting out the song was message enough—he was defying his assassins openly and publicly. Fifty was back, and to shut him up they would have to finish the job. The palpable anger in his voice and the hard-driving sound of the song made it a sensation on the streets. It also came with an added punch—because he seemed to be inviting more violence, the public had to grab up everything he produced before he was killed. The life-and-death angle made for a compelling spectacle.
    Now the songs started to pour out of him. He fed off all the anger he felt and the doubts people had had about him. He was also consumed with a sense of urgency—this was his last chance to make it and so he worked night and day. Fifty’s mix-tapes began to hit the street at a furious pace.
    Soon he realized the greatest advantage he possessed in this campaign—the feeling that he had already hit bottom and had nothing to lose. He could attack the record industry and poke fun at its timidity. He could pirate the most popular songs on the radio and put his own lyrics over them to create wicked parodies. He didn’t care about the consequences. And the further he took this the more his audiences responded. They loved the transgressive edge to it. It was like a crusade against all the fake crap on the radio, and to listen to Fifty was to participate in the cause.

    On and on he went, transforming every conceivable negative into a positive. To compensate for the lack of money to distribute his mix-tapes far and wide, he decided to encourage bootleggers