(This week, 50 even excommunicated his protégé, the Game, from the G-Unit, his rap crew, which includes Lloyd Banks, Young Buck, and Tony Yayo. Seems the young rapper, who scored a chart-topping debut in January with ''The Documentary," refused to get involved in his mentor's various squabbles. What 50 angrily branded as disrespectful sounds a lot like maturity.)
Released early to thwart Internet leaks, ''The Massacre" will become one of the year's biggest releases by slavishly adhering to the same rules that made his debut a multimillion-selling smash. This is an album about big hooks, infectious, head-bopping beats, and choruses a 2-year-old could sing, if one doesn't object to a toddler chirping about gunfights and sexually compliant women.
The woman featured on this CD's 40-second intro, however, suffers a different but no less appalling treatment. After opening a Valentine's Day package (this album was originally slated for a Feb. 15 release), her screams mix with a barrage of bullets, which finally ends with the peal of shell casings hitting the floor. Having gotten rich, 50 perhaps needs to show that he hasn't gone all soft. He remains as menacing as ever on ''In My Hood," in which he raps ''[Expletive] got love for me, but I don't go nowhere without my strap [gun] in my hood."
This sort of thing was all fine and good when 50, whose given name is Curtis Jackson, was still living in his tough Queens neighborhood; now, his hood is lovely Farmington, Conn., where I'm guessing there are neither ''expletives" nor ''a house party off the hook, until the shots go off."
