50 Cent - How He Became Famous

50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, was born on July 6th 1975 in South Jamaica, Queens.
He doesn't know his father and his mother Sabrina was only fifteen when she gave birth to him.
His mother was a crack dealer and was murdered in 1988 at the age of 25 so Curtis went to live with his grandparents.
At the age of twelve he started dealing drugs during the 1980s crack epidemic.
He says he never smoked it just sold it.
On June 29, 1994 he was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover cop.
He was arrested again three weeks later after police searched his place and found drugs.
He was sentenced to nine years in prison but managed to serve six months in a boot camp.
50 first started rapping in around 1996 in a friend's basement where he used turntables to record over instruments.
It was that same year that a friend introduced him to Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC who was setting up his own label.
Jay taught him how to count bars, write choruses, structure songs, and how to make a record.
Curtis credits Jam Master Jay for helping improve his ability to write hooks.
Jam Master Jay worked with 50 to produce his first album however it was never released.
Jackson's popularity started to rise with his underground single "How To Rob" which he claims he wrote in half an hour in a car on the way to the studio.
The song was very controversial and it explains how he would rob famous artists.
On May 24, 2000 he got shot nine times outside his grandmother house in South Jamaica, Queens.
He was in the hospital for thirteen days and managed to fully recover in five months.
While he was in hospital he managed to sign a deal with Columbia Records but due to his song "Ghetto Qu'ran" he was dropped and blacklisted in the recording industry.
Because of this he travelled to Canada and in Canada he recorded over thirty songs for mixtapes, which he did for the purpose of building a reputation.
It was in 2002 that Eminem listened to a copy of 50's Guess Who's Back CD.
Which was given to him by Jackson's attorney who was working with Eminem's manager Paul Rosenberg at the time.
Eminem was impressed with it so he invited Curtis to fly over to Los Angeles, which he did and he was introduced to Dr Dre.
He then signed a $1 million record deal and the rest as they say is history.