50 Cent's Twitter feed: Brilliant marketing or irresponsible behavior

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

The Thug & The Candidate

from Vibe.com

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CRITICAL NOIR:
The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity
by Mark Anthony Neal

"That black men who display hypermasculine characteristics fetishize--that is, simultaneously love and loathe--those considered less masculine or, to be explicit, that niggas covet faggots has been unmasked in insightful criticism. That faggots desire to be niggas has occasioned less critique..."

--Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity

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One of the prevailing theses of the current election season is that Senator Barack Hussein Obama is not the round-way-brand of black man. Such a premise is palpable only to the extent that one chooses to read Obama against the image of marketplace confections of black masculinity, particularly those that legibly erect centuries' old tropes of danger, bestial behavior, and sinister eroticism. The idea that we should distinguish between the candidate and the thug(s) is one of the defining truisms of polite society--less a measure of the candidate's humanity and more so an index of the tolerance within said polite society.

But black men do not live in polite society--however effectively they earn their keep within those spaces--and even the candidate's wife understands this, telling CBS news months ago about her fears that her husband might get shot at a gas station in Chicago as opposed to being assassinated on the campaign trial by some desperate political actor yelling "traitor." As Chris Rock surmised some time ago, niggas don't get assassinated, they get shot--and there always been more of a chance that the Senator from Illinois's fate would be decided by a bullet intended for a nigga, as opposed to that intended for the candidate, because quiet as it's kept--Harvard pedigree notwithstanding--Obama never stops being a black man. And this is perhaps the implicit message of Byron Hurt's recent film short Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect. The film is a brilliant and thoughtful intervention on the subject of black masculinity at a moment when Senator Barack Obama is poised to redefine black manhood for much of the world.

There is a telling sequence early in Hurt's Barack & Curtis, where radio journalist Esther Armah, states that "Barack equaled Harvard, someone like 50 Cent equaled hood; hood equaled virility, Harvard equaled impotence." That Armah's compelling observation is rarely disturbed speaks to the extent that many of our perceptions about black masculinity have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish the niggas from the black men. As such Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are little more than brands, in a highly volatile and fabulously lucrative, politicized marketplace.

Read the Full Essay @

A Thug's Humanity? A Consideration of Curtis Jackson

A Thug’s Humanity?
by Mark Anthony Neal

At this point—as if there was ever a previous point—any discussion about the artistic merit of Curtis Jackson’s “music” is little more than a banal exercise in corporate music journalism. Mr. Jackson has never been interested in art, no matter how we might shift the signifiers to fit into the expectations of a music industry that seems to have little use for actual music. Yet Mr. Jackson’s literal body and its cartoonish doppelganger, 50 Cent, continue to stimulate curiosity, if only because of his deft performance of late stage American masculinity.

Considered purely within the context of a constructed masculinity, 50 Cent might rank as one of the most compelling examples of black masculinity since Jack Johnson. Signature generational figures like Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) or Tupac Shakur, challenged notions of black masculinity in their respective historical eras, in part, because they complicated how black masculinity functioned in distinct political, cultural, social, religious and sexual spheres. In the case of Jack Johnson it was the blunt force of his masculinity and the anxieties produced in response to fears of how that force might be employed beyond the boxing ring, that made him the projection of so many racialized and gendered fantasies. In the case of Mr. Jackson such fears are purely the product of the capitalist wet dream that literally feeds upon—consumption as literal practice—the “body” 50 Cent willingly provides.


Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com