How The 50 Cent, Kanye West “Beef” Of 2007 Was A Hard Reset For Hip-Hop

Relive an epic moment in music history when two heavyweight rappers battled it out for album sales supremacy and ended up putting

hip-hop in the middle of the pop culture zeitgeist to stay.

Since 2001, the date Sept. 11 has been solely reflective of one pivotal moment in American history, though a decade ago music fans’

attention was temporarily redirected. It was all thanks to hip-hop, as 50 Cent and Kanye West willfully entangled themselves in

September 2007 in a playful beef that attracted major headlines.

Both were at turning points in their respective careers; both were dropping their all-important third albums. 50 Cent was geared to

release Curtis on Sept. 11, 2007. West was readying Graduation for a Sept. 18 release, though he bumped it up a week to set the stage

for what was perhaps the biggest nonviolent event in hip-hop history — as the two duked it out in a contest to see who would take

home a bigger haul of album sales.

Of course, we all know the results: West’s Graduation won with a staggering 957,000 units sold, while 50 Cent topped out at 691,000

units. The effects of this epic matchup, however, have reverberated to this day, as hip-hop music made a hard left and hasn’t returned

since.

Prior to Sept. 11, 2007, anything hip-hop related never really echoed on a grandiose scale, save for the tragic losses of Tupac Shakur

and the Notorious B.I.G. in 1996 and 1997, respectively. When a beef would casually surface or a rapper was rolling out a new project,

it was hip-hop’s little secret. Sure, communally speaking it was a big deal, but the rest of the world lacked enthusiasm despite hip-

hop’s growing popularity within the mainstream. The year 2007 was perhaps the tipping point for the crisis hip-hop was going

through two years prior.

In 2005 50 Cent released his monumental sophomore effort, The Massacre, giving Fif a significant feather in his cap with what would be the second best-selling album of that year, trailing only Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation Of Mimi. In the first week alone, The Massacre moved 1.14 million units (ultimately selling more than 5 million copies in the United States).

West was still riding high off the fumes of his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, so by that following year his sophomore work, Late Registration, gave him an impressive 860,000 sales in its first week on its way to more than 3 million copies sold.

These figures alone indicated that while 50 Cent’s breed of “street rap” that nearly carried him through the early aughts was arguably still thriving, something different was brewing by necessity.

“You couldn’t out-thug 50 Cent. Nothing street was gonna come next that was gonna eliminate him,” explains Vanessa Satten, editor-in-chief of XXL Magazine. “That was as street as we could get.”