Beef is good for you

Given the recent trajectory of 50 Cent's career, from The Massacre's two wanksta-rap singles, to beefing with his protege The Game to the point of gunplay in an episode that smells suspiciously like a publicity stunt, he's on the road toward deserving quite a bit of hatred.
That said, the first time I ever heard a 50 Cent song was such a profound, only-in-New York experience that no matter how hard he works on deserving it, he'll never outlast my barest shred of goodwill.
Here's the background:
The first person I met when I moved to New York two years ago was the RA of the Penthouse floor of Lafayette residence hall.
For those of you unfamiliar with Lafayette, that job was like being paid by the university to live in Animal House even before Residence Life, in its infinite wisdom, decided to zone half of its cavernous apartments as Greek last fall.
Upon learning that I was alone in the city, the RA - let's call him Drunky McCloseted - invited me to visit him sometime.
I took him up on his offer the next day; since that was a Friday, it resulted in a crash course in nightlife at NYU.
Upon my arrival in his apartment, Drunky offered me a screwdriver. Then some of his RA pals came over, and we went to another apartment to do some shots of Belvedere.
It soon became obvious, to me at least, that since the plan for the evening involved a club in SoHo, poor little under-aged me would be left out of the festivities.
Luckily, since my new friends were resourceful university employees, they found me a passable fake ID in a jiffy, and we were off.
The club was small, the drinks were overpriced, and the music - a mix of hip-hop that was strangely lacking in West Coast flava to my California ears - was nevertheless bangin'.
The RAs and I danced like silly, drunken college students.
While much of the rest of the evening is a blur, one moment stands out crystal clear, even today:
As one, now-forgotten track ended, the DJ began to scratch in a malevolent, martial keyboard riff and intoned, "This is the hottest joint in the city, ya'll!" The beat dropped and everyone lost their shit. Of course, the song was 50 Cent's "In Da Club."
Lots has happened to 50 since then. Get Rich or Die Trying, surely one of the decade's defining gangsta rap records, dropped, and along the way to shifting beaucoup units he destroyed Ja Rule and launched the careers of like nine people.
But although 50 could out-rap Ja while gagged, The Massacre's profoundly short-sighted diss track "Piggy Bank" - wherein he takes on Fat Joe ("That fat nigga thought 'Lean Back' was 'In Da Club'/My shit sold 11 mil, his shit was a dud") and, more inadvisedly, two of hip-hop's pre-eminent lyricists, Jadakiss and Nas - may signal an act of narcissistic self-annihilation.
No one's disputing 50's fantastic voice and sometimes-hypnotic (though more often, on the stultifyingly boring The Massacre, narcotic) flow.
But he seems to think his record sales and his status as the reigning king of commercial hip-hop gives him not only the license but also the lyrical ability to take on the greats.
"Checkmate," Jadakiss' brutally incisive response to 50's rather ham-handed swipe, shows that Mr. Jackson is getting in way over his head. "You should just sell clothes and sneakers," Jada raps, "Cuz out of your whole camp your flow's the weakest." That's not even the best couplet in the song, and mind that this is all before Nas - who arguably outrapped Jay-Z - has even started talking.
Though critics, most recently and most unexpectedly Eminem, have decried modern popular rap's lyrical beefs and their potential to escalate into real-world violence, few have given them due credit as an element of hip-hop's evolutionary mechanism.
As unaccountably popular rappers, like Ja Rule, for example, get too big for their britches, hungry emcees like the 50 Cent of yore step in and make their own reputations by humbling them.
If Jada and Nas dice him like they ought to, perhaps soon the country will see that - aside from a pair of snow-white G-Unit sneakers - the emperor has no clothes.