While 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, it also marks a milestone accomplishment for 50 Cent, who will be celebrating 20 years of his debut album. Reflecting on the early years of his career, he talked to Rolling Stone about his feud with Ja Rule, admitting he was went too far when he sparred against Fat Joe and all of Ja’s associates.
“There’s an element, a part of our culture that I’m aware of it because I am it,” he said. “Your Lil Durks, your NBA YoungBoys, the whole surrounding cast of that … it almost splits our culture in half because when you cool with one, you can’t work with the other.”
“I was using the same thinking in the very beginning of my career because it’s just the thinking you would use in the environment,” 50 continued. “If anybody went next to Ja Rule, I’d jump on the person who featured with them, anybody who was faintly near them, ’cause I put him on life support and you wanna go resuscitate him. So that energy, later you look at it and you go, ‘I was buggin.’”
50, who in the past traded insults with Joe and his Terror Squad, says he now sees him as someone who was just being a loyal friend.
“Fat Joe, his issues, I would see him a little uncomfortable with the success I was having, and I interpreted as, ‘He doesn’t like me,’ when he’s really the kind of guy you want to be friends with because he’s loyal to a default,” 50 said. “He’s so loyal for one record that [Murder Inc.] did with him that we became enemies.”
50 and Joe ended their feud at the 2012 BET Hip Hop Awards following the death of friend/music manager Chris Lighty.
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