Quietly but repeatedly, twice in each chorus of the song that introduced him to the global pop market as a hard-nosed hood kingpin, he’s framing his identity through language and idiom and metaphor. The distinction between having sex and making love is negligible biologically but critical sentimentally, after all-and here’s 50 using it to tell us how uninterested he is in sentimentality. It’s slippery, though, this little pinprick of character definition, how what it says sits at odds with the way it’s expressed. It’s perfectly clear what he means by this: he doesn’t have time for romance.
“I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love.”
Except there’s this one line, tucked memorably but unassumingly into the hook, a line you could in fact read as the very essence of 50’s no-nonsenseness: It is, and fittingly for the calling card of a no-nonsense street magnate, a bracingly direct song. When he offers you ecstasy-“I got the X if you’re into taking drugs”-he’s barely even using slang. When he says you can find him in the club, he’s not being evasive if you’re looking for him, that’s probably where he’ll be. He once even described the name 50 Cent as “a metaphor for change.” Yet when you look closely, “In Da Club” contains almost no wordplay, no figuration, no trickery. Now, generally speaking, 50 relies as much as any rapper does on similes, homophones, trick rhymes, and assorted other kinds of semantic misdirection. After fifteen years of career ups and downs, flops and feuds, fluctuating wealth and implausibly diverse investments, it remains an indelible sketch of 50 at his fiftiest. So he puts the song to work for him, makes it tell us what he’s about, what he’s been through, who his friends are, how he moves through the world. If we’re meant to take anything away from the song, though, it’s that 50 is twenty-five percent hedonist and seventy-five percent hustler. It was 50 Cent’s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, cars and jewelry, prospective lovers and pissy haters. You’ve probably heard the stately bounce of “In Da Club,” at least ambiently. The answer is “yes, many.” I was making a point. Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don’t have to answer that. So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed. I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love By Daniel Levin Becker JanuArts & Culture
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