Nine bullets. One in the face.
Curtis Jackson, the rapper the world knows as 50 Cent, tells it without drama: “I was shot nine times and kept going; it didn’t stop me”. They took out the teeth on one side of his mouth, and he was left with bullet fragments in his tongue. His voice changed completely, and he doubted whether he would ever be able to rap again.
But what hurt him most came later. His record label, Columbia, dropped him in 1999 after the shooting and stopped answering his calls. They shelved the album he had just recorded, and he was left not knowing what he was going to do with his life. “Getting shot wasn’t the most painful experience for me”, he acknowledged in an interview with Spin magazine.
From his hospital bed, he signed a publishing deal with EMI and received an advance of 100.000 dollars, which he lived on while he couldn’t make music. The voice the bullet left him with is the one millions later learned to recognize.