“I even saw when keeping it real...went out of style. Now it’s like, it doesn’t matter what it is, it just matters that it sounds good.” This is 50 Cent letting his guard down in a humble, humanizing GQ profile. Fully aware he hasn’t been the underdog or on top since his indelible hook from the Game’s “Hate it or Love It”, he’s presumably making a plea for sympathy. If it’s not as off the mark as some of his recent pitches, it’s close, since it’d be much easier to take his side if he was, y’know, making music that sounds good. 50 was handsomely rewarded over a decade ago for keeping it real, and whether as a rapper or an actor, the only role Curtis Jackson has been successfully able to play is 50 Cent in Get Rich or Die Tryin'. His last major motion picture role and last album both ended about the same way.
What he doesn’t realize is that if Curtis Jackson really “kept it real” in 2014, we’d get to know the guy behind the Street King energy drink, the self-help books, the consistently entertaining ThisIs50.com website, the near pornographic musculature. Curtis Jackson is a very interesting guy and has never been more likeable than he is right now—and unfortunately, Curtis Jackson is nowhere to be found on Animal Ambition.
Here, 50 Cent is ditching the unrepentant gangsta rap misanthropy of 2009's Before I Self Destruct, which was just about the only thing it had going for it. But 50’s voice remains one of hip-hop’s great instruments, forever instantly recognizable. He can spend the rest of his life saying basically anything and it’ll sound great, particularly if it conveys any part of the term “fuck-you money.” At the very least, Animal Ambition goes the slightest bit outside of the surgical steel, Beats-EQ’d knockoffs that reliably filled out his past albums (Dr. Dre makes his sole appearance as part of the team behind the antiseptic “Smoke”). “Irregular Heartbeat” could pass for minimal witch house, while the title track undergoes as much as vocal manipulation and obtrusive, blocky production tricks as an Autre Ne Veut song (trust, though, that the results are nowhere near as interesting as the description).
Otherwise, Animal Ambition doesn’t exist in 2014 as much as it does in some theoretical plane where 50 Cent has the kind of status outlined in Drake’s “Tuscan Leather”—“This ain’t nothin’ for the radio/ But they’ll still play it though.” Hard to believe, but there's ten singles that have been released from Animal Ambition thus far, and they range from passable Hot 97 lurkers to passable bottle service bangers. I could go on pointing out the numerous ways that 50 Cent is trying to score a current club hit playing by his old rules, but I think the mere appearance of “feat. Trey Songz” on the tracklist more than speaks for itself.
The anachronism is even more pronounced elsewhere—as far as “name” rappers go, we get Yo Gotti, Prodigy, Styles P and Jadakiss, all doing their Expendables thing, action figures in a meta-performative recall of their musclebound glory days. We also get plenty of 50’s new protege, the enthusiastically generic non-entity Kidd Kidd, who rhymes “doo doo” with “Blues Clues”, “Mickey Mouse” with “Mickey Mantle”, and ends a verse with “Left his brains hangin’ out like we chillin’.” When all's said and done, Kidd gives 50 the same groaner punchlines as Wiz Khalifa at a fraction of the cost.
By pretending his access is limited to Uncle Murda's budget and Rolodex, 50 gives this project a high profit margin, though I imagine that’s not what he was talking about when he stated “entrepreneurial energy” as the motivating factor behind Animal Ambition. It’s pointedly brief— 11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited—and in the album’s first line (and probably the second most memorable), he expresses surprise at being “rich as motherfucker and ain’t much changed.”
He is rich as a motherfucker, and this, in and of itself, is not a problem, as Curtis Jackson rapping about such topics is bound to be interesting. Even if your annual salary is $100,000, you’d have to work 1,400 consecutive years just to match his rumored Vitamin Water windfall. And yet, 50 Cent is so vague and illusory throughout, you’d somehow think he was lying about shit that is totally true; he says he “stack[s] paper like I’m trying to fix the national debt” and that’s kinda funny, but for the level of detail he gives us, for all we know he could be blowing stacks at the Container Store.
Maybe the true folly lies in expecting something more out of Animal Ambition than we're used to from 50 at this point, so a better exercise would be to ask: What would a great 50 Cent album even sound like in 2014? Would it have to be a strict Get Rich or Die Tryin’ revival? An 808s and Heartbreak-style mea culpa? A rebranding as hip-hop ombudsman meets political firebrand, dead prez in a higher tax bracket? The answer is unclear, and 50 Cent doesn’t know either—as evidenced by a doddering appearance on Chief Keef’s “Hate Bein’ Sober” and the G-Unit reunion at this past weekend’s Summer Jam, 50 can only impose himself at hip-hop’s center by force and he always ends up looking more desperate than the people he's supposedly doing a favor. There may not be much Curtis Jackson on Animal Ambition, but it does give an accurate survey of where 50 Cent is at right now.
