50 Cent’s Poor Lil Rich

As a rapper, one of 50 Cent’s greatest assets is his ability to rap and sing at the same time. Now, all rappers sing to a certain extent, as the human voice always takes on some qualities of pitch. But 50 Cent uses pitch far more than most other rappers. He transitions seamlessly between deadpan verses and lyrical choruses, as in Many Men (Wish Death), If I Can’t, and one of my all-time favorites, Heat. Sometimes, you can’t tell whether he’s rapping or singing, as in the second verse of P.I.M.P. and the beginning of the second verse of In da Club.

What makes Poor Lil Rich an interesting song is that 50 Cent largely abandons his trademark use of pitch in favor of monotone. Just listen to his first entrance – 50’s pitch doesn’t change until he finishes the first phrase with “what up, homy.” This approach lets us to see a different side of 50, the strictly rhythmical one. The results are impressive.

The chorus and the second verse are the highlights of this song. If you ignore the chants of “n****,” which at first seem crude but later seem unimportant, the chorus almost sounds like a drum cadence:

I was a poor (n****)
Now I'm a rich (n****)
Getting paper now you can't tell me shit (n****)

The first two lines have identical rhythms. The third line begins with the same rhythm, but extends it by a few beats for a brief coda.

The second verse uses repetition of rhythm in an equally powerful way:

See 50 play for keeps,
and 50 stay with heat.
I can't go commercial –
they love me in the street

Again, each of these four lines has identical rhythm. 50 is simply banging out a drum cadence. The last line here is especially powerful, as it is the only portion of the entire song in which the beat drops out. Perhaps 50 chose to emphasize this line because the words so strongly resonate with his rap persona, one inextricably tied to street cred.

The beat, produced by Sha Money XL, lends itself to the type of strait up rhythm that 50 so aptly provides. A synthesizer dominates the beat, bumping out a nearly identical pattern every beat. A symbol is beating 16^th notes throughout the entire song. A sparse guitar part provides a little ornamentation. This is a simple, tightly mathematical beat, and 50 clearly recognizes this. The result is one of the most underrated tracks on Get Rich or Die Tryin.

The worst part of this song is 50’s last verse. No rapper should ever rap about what he does on the different days of the week – it inevitably sounds corny and unoriginal. Nas had the same problem on the second verse of Hold Down the Block on Hip Hop is Dead. 50 knows how weak his last verse is, which helps explain why it’s so much shorter than the other two. Nevertheless, Poor Lil Rich represents a solid track on what can only be described as a classic album.