50 Cent – ‘In Da Club’

26 April 2003

‘Fairytale Of New York’ fans: the original version of 50 Cent’s ‘In Da Club’ features the same homophobic f-slur that you insist on defending every Christmas, but the radio edit I’m posting in the video below doesn’t include it. This is the kind of ‘woke’ thing I know drives you ballistic. Will it be an issue for you here? I ask because I’m genuinely curious at your doublethink of going ride-or-die for it in one song, but then—one would hope—disapproving of it elsewhere. Does Shane MacGowan get a pass from you because for you he’s A Real Artist and those rap fellas aren’t? Is excusing ‘Fairytale’ just a Christmas thing for you, like egg nog and reindeer jumpers? Or am I doing you a disservice and you’re consistently pro-keeping the f-slur on all chart hits on all radios all year round? (Hint: it means the same thing in ‘Fairytale Of New York’ as it means in ‘In Da Club’.)

I’ll say this for ‘In Da Club (radio edit)’: that driving beat and that dramatic synth-plus-steel-drum hook are fantastic, like the score to the Platonic ideal of a Fast & Furious film. “It’s your birthday!” has been a valuable addition to human civilisation too. Plus, handclaps. So far, so good. Unfortunately, where ‘In Da Club’ falls down is that it insists on then being a 50 Cent record. Yes, his dour, monosyllabic rapping meets the intensity of the beat and hook. A few lines of it, though, are enough to have me heartily sick of his musclebound persona. Also, Eminem is name-checked in this and appears in the video: someone with a similar line in words that begin with ‘f’ and end with homophobia.

Fortunately, I’ve found an instrumental-only edit of ‘In Da Club’ online, with no words at all. It’s brilliant. Have they tried one of those for ‘Fairytale Of New York’ yet?