We want to meet the real Curtis behind the $500 million empire.50 Cent's Twitter Feed: Brilliant Marketing or Irresponsible Behavior?by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) has a Twitter account. Given the rather mundane content of most of his recent recordings, no one should really care. But more than 3 million people do care enough to follow 50 Cent and the travails of his rumored love bunny Chelsea Handler. He rarely has anything of substance to say—which is not to say that some of his observations aren’t funny. It is perhaps marketing genius that the rapper-mogul has become a Twitter celebrity—separate and distinct from his real life celebrity.
50 Cent’s use of Twitter is the perfect example of the ways that mainstream celebrities, particularly rappers, have sought to distinguish between their branded selves and their individual selves. For example, as Snoop Dogg continues to sell music, it was Calvin Broadus the doting, Cliff Huxtable-like father who was the star of the E!’s Fatherhood.
While California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rarely has to distance himself from his Terminator character, rappers are almost never given the opportunity distance themselves from their rap personas. There are also quite a few rappers who invest in those personas 24-7, because they are so lucrative.
As such, I’m grown enough to know that that the music of 50 Cent, which I largely despise, is not the sum total of the man named Curtis Jackson, who by-the-way, is worth more than $500 million. With the help of figures like Chris Lightly, Jackson has become a savvy businessman and 50 Cent’s presence on Twitter is just an extension of his acute sense of how to effectively market his persona.
Even 50 Cent’s dog—Oprah Winafree—has gotten in on the act, as 50 Cent presumably ghost-tweets the dog’s twitter alias OprahtheDog. Perhaps even Jackson’s team is behind Twitter’s @English50Cent, which translates 50 Cent’s tweets into “standard” English. As a whole there’s a Bakhtin-esque quality to 50 Cent’s tweeter presence, that suggest high satire more than utter ignorance.
Read the Full Essay @
theLoop21 
