At the end of the video for “All His Love,” 50 Cent advises the listener, “Ni**as think they better than me, but they not. Fu*k that. I’m just gonna start over.” While it’s likely just hyperbole, the fact is, many of rap’s elder statesmen have difficulty recreating the success that propelled them early in their career. Ferrari, er, 50 Cent, however, seems to be eliciting a generally positive streets/net response to his latest mixtape release, The Lost Tape. With “All His Love,” he shows, if just for for a few minutes, that if he was breaking in as a new artist, he might still be a force to reckon with in today’s musical landscape.
The song itself isn’t groundbreaking, but it works the audience a new artist needs to court, the young and brash. It’s a basic, but smooth, mid-tempo kick-snare beat, with content that rap critics could vehemently point to as an example of the unnecessarily raunchy nature of rap music. “All His Love” is most notable for how many lines end in the word “bitch,” albeit cleverly at times.
But that’s maybe 50’s point. The business landscape of hip hop is not yet opening doors for the more progressive, intelligent sound that’s bubbling at the fringes, and is still chock full of strip club-inspired, every-other-word-a-curse, rap songs and videos. And while there are still plenty of new artists seeking to stake their claim in that sub-genre’s lane, these new jacks should take note how a somewhat revolutionary veteran, in the game for more than a decade, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and who can flash his various business ventures throughout his video, can also still kick that grimy, gutter, don’t-give-a-f*ck hip hop, and do so in an entertaining manner.
Self-appointed kings of modern rap swag have a long way to go to top that.
So, while the women give 50 Cent all his love, I’m gonna give him all his props. Not many successful, veteran artists in hip hop can still find a way to sound so refreshing, sticking to the guns that made him. It’s new 50, sounding like old 50, without sounding old.
It’s not a easy thing to do, but Ferrari does his thing up in this bitch.