50 Cent sat down recently with Dimitri Ehrlich of Interview Magazine. The G-Unit General gave some interesting insight into what it was like coming up hustling, why it doesn't bother him to fly coach and a lot more. Check out an excerpt from the interview below.EHRLICH: Do you get annoyed that people are afraid to say no to you?
50 CENT: Well, I have friends that treat me the same way they did before I was the boss. They don’t actually want anything from me.EHRLICH: Like who? Who’s your best friend?
50 CENT: My best friend? Damn. Probably Eminem. We don’t get a chance to hang out much, but we use the telephone. When I was in Detroit, I stayed at his house. He provided an opportunity for me, for all of these things to happen.EHRLICH: Do you still only communicate with your ex-wife, the mother of your son, via lawyers?
50 CENT: I don’t have any communications with her.EHRLICH: Do you ever think, with all this wealth and success, there are some things money can’t buy, like a happy marriage?
50 CENT: Yeah, but then you have people who don’t have any wealth and find themselves in spaces where relationships don’t work. People are like plants: They grow; they change every day. When a person completely has nothing but negative interest in you and would like nothing more than to see you in the worst situation possible, then why would you consistently go toward that energy?EHRLICH: I would assume that one of the most difficult things you’ve had to negotiate in life was the loss of your mother, who was murdered when you were eight years old.
50 CENT: Exactly.
EHRLICH: Do you remember that moment—getting the news? How has that loss continued to affect you to this day?
50 CENT: Well, I was a baby—I was eight when my mom passed. The reason my mom made the choice of going into the lifestyle she went into . . . I was the motivation for her going into that. She had me when she was 15, and teenage pregnancy wasn’t as common as it is now. And at that point, there’s no blue card. Your options were either to go on welfare or to go into the lifestyle that she went into, hustling to get what she could provide. So I remember my mom and associate her with everything good because every time she showed up, she had something for me. I never knew my father, so she was everything, you know? After I lost my mom, I can remember feeling like I wanted to go into a park but it was raining outside, and I felt like it was raining because my mom was dead. Literally, I used to feel like everything that was going wrong was going wrong because my mom wasn’t there. I remember when she passed and my grandparents told me that she was going away, that she was going to be in a better place—I didn’t understand that. Went to her funeral and everything and still didn’t understand what was going on. Just knew that everything that was good went away. And then all of the people that I ran into who appeared to have a nice lifestyle, the things that I wanted, like nice cars and nice jewelry—people who were well-kept and looked like they was living good—they were all from my mom’s life. They said, “Hey, what’s up, little Sabrina?” They used to call me my mother’s name because they knew me as Sabrina’s little boy. They’d look down and be like, “Why your shoes look like that?” And then they’d buy me shoes. And afterward, they’d take me aside and say, “Hey, if anyone bothers you, then you tell ’em you got those shoes from me.” And that’s giving you a license to actually sell the shit in the neighborhood. But even when I was selling, I had to do it between 3 P.M. and 6 P.M., when my grandmother thought I was in the after-school program.EHRLICH: Did you ever sample the goods when you were dealing drugs?
50 CENT: Nah. As far as getting high was concerned, it was easy: Do I spend $10 on some weed and smoke it, or do I hold on to $10 that I need to live?EHRLICH: What would you say is the art of a true hustler?
50 CENT: True hustlers are prepared to get hustled and know when to change positions and move to something different and aren’t afraid. Even the toughest guys are afraid to be anything outside of the toughest guys.
EHRLICH: Your charity, the G-Unity Foundation, gives grants to low-income kids to get through school, which makes perfect sense, but explain why when you opened the Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden [in Jamaica, Queens], you partnered with Bette Midler, whose core audience is, well, very different from yours.
50 CENT: Yeah, her core audience is different from mine, but we had the same intentions at that point: We were working together to do something positive for the youth in that area. Bette is probably one of the top 100 philanthropists in New York City, and to get with her and do something positive in my actual neighborhood made perfect sense. Following that, we’ve been a part of other projects together. I don’t actually promote what I do for charity—you shouldn’t even be doing it if you’re doing it to promote it. But what’s troubling is that I sometimes feel like I’m being held to standards that they don’t usually hold other people to. Like, we did this event called Family Day in Queens, and they made me have licensed vendors for food, but they didn’t give me the sound permit. And then Mayor Bloomberg and the governor—it’s on the Web now—they were talking about how they reached out to me and I told them that I wasn’t going to perform, that I was just going to attend it. But one of their stipulations was for me not to actually perform at the event. The New York Post wrote negative articles about it; they said I’m a “bullet magnet”! They printed a two-page story showing the distance from where I got shot to the location where I was trying to throw the event. I don’t think they realized that the event was for kids. You see what I’m saying?EHRLICH: Right, you’re just trying to help kids, and they’re being insulting.
50 CENT: Right. So it’s interesting. I got my ass kicked for trying to do something cool, you know what I mean?EHRLICH: I read that you don’t mind flying coach. Is that true? How do folks react when they find themselves sitting next to you in economy?
50 CENT: Well, I really don’t mind flying coach if I have to. If the front of the plane is sold out, I’ll sit in the back. Some people are like, “Oh, first class is sold out. I can’t go.” I guess they care about people seeing that they’re not sitting in first class. But I’m clear with my financial space—I don’t need to get any validation by someone else who sits next to me in first class. If you think a seat in first class makes you a star, then you’re not one.
To Read The Rest Of The Interview Please Go To InterviewMagazine.com
Photo Credit: Robbie Fimmano
Follow Me @Twitter.com/ChasinMoPaper
}
Comments