3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “It was literally Ali-Frazier,” says MC Serch. “It was two guys in their prime going toe to toe. Nas was the underdog because he had put out two subpar albums and didn’t have a real sense of direction. Jay was a beast, but no one would ever doubt Nas’s prowess as an emcee.”25

  Nas responded with “Ether,” considered by many to be the most devastating diss track in hip-hop history. He simultaneously excoriated Jay-Z for his physical appearance and his lyrical treatment of Notorious B.I.G. “First Biggie’s your man, then you got the nerve to say that you better than Big,” Nas rapped. “Dick-sucking lips, why don’t you let the late great veteran live?” He saved his best for last: “Queens niggas run you niggas, ask Russell Simmons!”

  Jay-Z countered with “Supa Ugly,” a graphic retort filled with vivid descriptions of his exploits with Nas’s ex, whom he called out by name. “Since you infatuated with saying that gay shit,” Jay-Z rapped, “yes, you was kissing my dick when you was kissing that bitch.” He also bragged about having had sex with the woman in question in the back of Nas’s Bentley and leaving condoms in the baby seat. The lyrics were so over-the-top that Jay-Z’s mom made him apologize to Nas.

  Fans are divided on who won the battle, but both artists won the commercial war. Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, whose sound was driven by a young producer by the name of Kanye West, went double platinum despite having been launched on September 11, 2001; Nas’s Stillmatic also topped the two million unit mark. Most importantly, the verbal spat never escalated into physical violence. Though hip-hop’s kings still had some growing up to do, they were certainly moving in the right direction.

  “Hip-hop was a cultural shift,” says Kevin Liles, who served as president of Def Jam during the height of the Nas–Jay-Z tiff. “It wasn’t just a sound… It’s one thing to just put out records that sound good that sell a lot. It’s another thing where, because I said this in a record, a company grew twenty percent.”26

  That’s exactly the sort of thing Rocawear and Sean John experienced as Jay-Z and Diddy continued to flaunt their own brands in songs and videos, at posh parties, and on Times Square billboards. At their peak, both clothing lines were doing several hundred million dollars a year in retail sales, as was Phat Farm. But the field had gotten crowded. On top of the street wear lines Fubu, Mecca, and Eckō Unltd, a host of rappers launched their own clothing lines, from Eminem’s Shady Ltd. to Nelly’s Apple Bottoms. The Wu-Tang Clan, which had started its own Wu-Wear line in the mid-1990s—and opened several brick-and-mortar stores—even launched a special-edition sneaker with Nike in 1999.27

  But the influx of mainstream interest had a downside. As department store shelves swelled with new arrivals, the big sellers started steeply discounting popular street wear. That put pressure on stores like Jimmy Jazz, V.I.M., and Dr. Jay’s, many of which declined during the 2000s. “We let Macy’s put them out of business,” says Simmons. “We didn’t know any better.”28

  Simmons and Jay-Z both knew enough to get out—and get paid—at the peak of the hip-hop fashion boom. In 2004, Simmons sold Phat Farm to half-century-old Sears supplier Kellwood for $140 million, retaining his role as chief executive and grabbing an array of lucrative performance incentives. His then wife, Kimora Lee Simmons (yes, another model), who’d become the face of women’s line Baby Phat, stayed on as well; Kellwood’s chief noted that this brand had better potential for growth than the original Phat Farm.29

  Meanwhile, sensing an opportunity, Jay-Z and the two partners to whom Simmons had introduced him paid a reported $22 million for Damon Dash’s Rocawear stake in 2005. Two years later, publicly traded clothing giant Iconix bought the rights to the brand for $204 million, with Jay-Z staying on as chief of product development and marketing; the deal also called for him to get up to $35 million in Iconix stock if Rocawear met certain sales goals.30 Diddy’s reaction: “I need a billion for mine.”31

  Jay-Z’s nine-figure haul came on top of a $5 million annual guarantee for his continued marketing efforts, according to industry sources—not bad, especially considering that the entire world economy collapsed about a year after the sale, and buyouts of this sort essentially ceased to exist for several years during the downturn. Simmons still marvels at the two sales.

  “I don’t know why they bought it,” he admits of the Phat Farm deal, offering a similar explanation for Iconix’s purchase. “When they bought Rocawear, it was a brick. They bought it at the end of its life. Both of us got out at the right time.”32

  Diddy dialed back his involvement in Sean John, too. In 2010, he reached an agreement to make Sean John sportswear available exclusively at Macy’s, where it has done well over $1 billion in sales to date. Terms of the deal were not released. “I got my start at Macy’s when I was sixteen, selling shirts and ties,” Diddy told the New York Post in 2010. “To come full circle like this is a dream come true.”33

  In November 2016, with Sean John doing annual retail sales of $450 million, Diddy finally joined Simmons and Jay-Z in pulling most of his money out of the clothing line he’d founded. He sold his controlling stake in Sean John to apparel giant CAA-GBG Global Brand Management Group for an undisclosed sum, keeping a reported 20 percent stake. (I estimate that he received about $70 million pretax for the one-third or so of Sean John that he sold; his team would not confirm the terms.) Said Diddy: “Our new partnership with CAA-GBG provides us the opportunity to reach the millennial customer on a global level.”34

  The agreement called for Diddy to remain involved with the marketing of the brand and for Sean John to continue its exclusive sportswear pact with Macy’s. Simmons takes a darker view of hip-hop’s relationship with the apparel business. “Sean John is the only brand [left],” he says. “We really had built up a nice industry that a lot of kids aspired to be in. Now it’s completely destroyed.”35

  Simmons may be right, at least when it comes to mass-market street wear. But the next generation of hip-hop acts is already building on the foundation laid by the likes of Phat Farm and Rocawear. Fashion-focused stars from Kanye West to A$AP Rocky have pushed out their own collections, with an eye more toward the runway than the racks at Macy’s. This approach may not be as remunerative as Diddy’s or Jay-Z’s was, but what it lacks in profitability, it makes up for in prestige—a currency that’s becoming perhaps more valuable than the dollar in the upper echelons of hip-hop.

  Simmons has finished his sweet pea soup, and only a smidge of his Green Juice remains. If his Yankees cap and shell-toed sneakers are a reminder of his past, his meal is a harbinger of the health-oriented future he’s trying to create.

  As hip-hop has grown up, Simmons has done things like shelling out $30 million to build a yoga studio in front of the trendy Soho House in Los Angeles, where he moved in 2015. (He even convinced Diddy to give yoga a try, though it doesn’t seem to have stuck.)36

  Hollywood is Simmons’s focus these days, along with his new portfolio of lifestyle brands, including Argyleculture and an energy drink called Celsius. He holds a “significant” stake in the publicly traded company—whose share price has more than doubled since he bought in—along with billionaire Li Ka-shing (a perennial contender for the title of Wealthiest Man in Asia; also, a lock for Best Name for a Rich Person).

  “So fucking strong,” says Simmons of the beverage. “I go to hot yoga class after a Celsius. It’s unbelievably powerful.”37

  I tell Simmons I appreciate that he’s taken the time to sit down with me.

  “Thank you,” he says. “What’s the book? The name of it?”

  “We’re leaning towards 3 Kings.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” he says, pausing to ponder Diddy, Dre, and Jay-Z. “They just said, ‘Why don’t I do it myself?’ It’s funny that in the other industries, people didn’t do it. All the rock stars, they never did it.”

  To be fair, there are a few rockers, including Sammy Hagar and Gene Simmons (no relation to Russell: the Kiss star was born Chaim Weitz in Israel), who have never been afraid to shill. But f
or the most part, the Def Jam founder is right: musicians tend to downplay anything having to do with money.

  “They’re afraid,” I offer. “They don’t want to be seen as sellouts.”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Simmons, as if suddenly remembering the aspirational energy at the core of the movement he helped invent. “That’s how they do it. That’s hip-hop.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A Fourth King?

  The first time I interviewed 50 Cent, I was in my twenties and living with three friends in a four-bedroom, one-bathroom Manhattan rental. By contrast, thirty-four-year-old 50 had reportedly paid Mike Tyson $4 million for a Connecticut mansion with nineteen bedrooms and thirty-five bathrooms—just another perk of the 2003 album Get Rich or Die Tryin’, which made him hip-hop’s newest superstar.1 According to Tyson, parties went on for days because he simply couldn’t find his guests to inform them that the festivities had concluded.2

  I ended up sitting down with 50 after kicking off Forbes’s full-time hip-hop coverage in 2007; one of my earliest assignments was to write a story on the topic of the rapper and his entourage. My editor envisioned a photo shoot featuring all the characters he believed 50 employed, like a guy whose sole job was to carry an umbrella. (Diddy had someone like this on his payroll many years earlier.) It took a while to convince this editor that 50 generally showed up at meetings with a less sexy group that included a lawyer, a brand manager, a publicist, and a business manager. At the photo shoot, all four walked into a boardroom and started to debate who should stand where. Clad in snakeskin boots, designer jeans, and a Yankees cap, 50 ultimately hopped up and stood on the conference table, arms folded, no smile. His employees took their places in office chairs behind him, hands clasped—no nonsense, all business.

  Following the shoot, 50 told me about his plan to become hip-hop’s first billionaire. He explained that, in addition to pouring his entertainment-related gains into accounts monitored by brokers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and throwing money into “golf courses in China,” he’d been working on a deal with South African metals mogul Patrice Motsepe. He said he’d visited the billionaire at one of his mines, and the two had traveled a mile below the earth’s surface. There, 50 gazed longingly at the glistening walls—packed with platinum, palladium, and iridium—and started maneuvering to land an equity stake in the mine in exchange for committing to a joint venture with Motsepe that would eventually bring 50 Cent–branded precious metals to market around the world.

  “Things that people wouldn’t actually expect me to be involved in,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got a diverse portfolio.”3

  Indeed, 50 Cent was one of the challengers that Diddy, Jay-Z, and Dr. Dre faced to win hip-hop’s cash crown in the second half of the aughts, perhaps the most formidable of their entire run. And though he couldn’t match their staying power, his example would serve as a valuable blueprint, thanks in large part to his striking one of the biggest deals in hip-hop history to that point.

  As was also true with this book’s titular kings, 50’s wealth as a young adult came in sharp contrast to his socioeconomic status as a child. Born Curtis Jackson III in Jamaica, Queens, and raised during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, he was just eight when his drug-dealing mother was murdered, and he began selling cocaine only a few years later. He’d been arrested three times by age nineteen, surviving several potentially deadly encounters along the way, one of them after he purchased an $80,000 Mercedes-Benz 400 SEL V12 sedan. One evening, a pair of gunmen who’d followed the car ambushed him in front of his grandmother’s home; after escaping the attack, he started looking for an alternate career path.4

  “I decided to write music, ’cause my son’s mom was pregnant at the time and I had to make some changes,” 50 told me. “So I ended up selling the car, and the money I got back from the actual vehicle we lived off of.”

  His first musical break came in 1999, when he landed a record deal with Columbia and gained a measure of regional fame for his first single, “How to Rob,” a song in which he half-jokingly delineates how he’d relieve all sorts of entertainers of their cash. Suggestions include robbing his own producers, kidnapping Diddy’s girlfriend and holding her for ransom, and putting four bullets through the door of Jay-Z’s Bentley. The latter responded with a potent line: “Go against [me], your ass is dense / I’m about a dollar, what the fuck is 50 Cents?”5

  Far from ending 50’s career, the attention only elevated him (and likely contributed to Jay-Z’s more recent philosophy of not responding to provocation, so as not to give challengers free publicity). Days before the planned 2000 launch of his first album, Power of the Dollar, 50 was again waylaid—and ended up taking nine bullets. He survived the strike, but his record deal didn’t: executives at Columbia, wary of the violence surrounding the rapper, dropped him from the label.

  “When you get hurt as bad as I got hurt when I was shot, either your fear consumes you or you become insensitive on some level,” 50 explained. “And people interpret my aggression in that period as gangster… when it was more like a response to being in the most vulnerable spot I’ve been in.”6

  As 50 nursed his wounds—including a shot to the mouth that gave his speech an almost Don Corleone–esque slur—he plotted his comeback, pumping out furious new mixtapes. In 2002, Eminem heard his driver playing one of the songs and alerted Dr. Dre to the Queens rapper’s talent; the duo flew 50 to Los Angeles for a meeting and signed him to a five-album deal, shared between Aftermath, Interscope, and Eminem’s Shady Records. The rapper says he spent the first $300,000 of his $1 million pact on trademarking “50 Cent” and “G-Unit,” which would become the name of his own record label, clothing line, and sneaker brand.7

  Dr. Dre and Eminem served as executive producers on his next album; Eminem appeared on several tracks and Dre produced a handful, including 50’s biggest hit, “In da Club.” The song typified Dre’s musical evolution from the 1990s to the 2000s, when the producer more frequently traded his Minimoog’s funky whine for relentless beats and sinister strings. As always, his exacting standards underpinned every detail, even those as minute as the seemingly ad-libbed spoken intro for “In da Club” (in which 50 spits a syncopated “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” before sliding into the chorus: “Go shorty, it’s your birthday, we’re gonna party like it’s your birthday…”). In reality, Dre carefully constructed the section in the studio, barking out a vocal instruction here or flicking a knob there.

  “Even though 50 would change up his vocals, there would still be repetitive parts—almost made the song boring—while we waited for the hook to kick in,” noted Dre’s erstwhile right-hand man, Bruce Williams. “So the producer adds a counter rhythm, a slight nin-nih-nin-nih pattern to speed things up. Now it’s good.”8

  Thanks to Dre’s attention to detail and 50’s aggressive rhymes, Eminem was so excited about the album that, even as he released his own record-breaking work, the music of his protégé surged to the top of his mind. At a party for 2002’s The Eminem Show, which sold 284,000 units its opening week and 1.3 million the week after in the United States alone, 50 talked to the elder rapper, who couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “He was like, ‘Yo, man, [your music] is it,’” 50 recalled. “‘This is the next big thing.’”9

  Shortly thereafter, Get Rich or Die Trying debuted atop the Billboard charts with opening week sales of 872,000 en route to a total north of six million in the United States and easily double that sum worldwide; both Eminem and Dre shared in the spoils. It was the best-selling album of the year and remains the most popular effort of 50’s career. He’s well aware of the magnitude of the accomplishment.

  “I mean, [look at] Tupac,” he says. “They got to kill you for you to do these kind of numbers.”10

  Diddy wasn’t selling records on a 50 Cent level—or at all, really—in the early 2000s. In 2001, he formally changed his name to P. Diddy (he dropped the P several years later)11 and released The Saga Continues…, an album about as tedious as its ellipsis-la
den title suggests. But that didn’t really matter: making a living by selling records was so twentieth century.

  Diddy scored his first true smash of the century with the reality television program Making the Band, in which he served as both executive producer and star. His goal in the show, launched in 2002, was to craft a hip-hop supergroup by handpicking the most promising, dedicated contestants as cameras rolled. That made for some entertaining television as Diddy assigned outlandish tasks, most memorably dispatching a handful of contestants from Manhattan to Brooklyn just to fetch him some cheesecake. (“I am an asshole sometimes,” he once admitted to me.)12

  That same year, 150 of Diddy’s closest friends, family members, and acquaintances received a hand-delivered DVD inviting them to travel to Morocco to celebrate his thirty-third birthday as special guests of the country’s royal family. Apparently, Diddy had told a friend that he wanted to hold the celebration in the Dominican Republic. The friend happened to know the king of Morocco, and the monarch convinced Diddy to change his plans.13

  And so, in the fall of 2002, two Royal Air Maroc jetliners arrived in New York to carry Diddy and his revelers—including Fab 5 Freddy, Naomi Campbell, Tommy Lee, Jessica Rosenblum, Andre Harrell, and Ivana Trump—to North Africa (another plane transported guests from Paris to Morocco). Upon reaching cruising altitude, Diddy’s voice rang out over the plane’s public-address system: “Our forefathers came over on a slave ship and we’re returning on a charter!”14 Dancing began; champagne popped; joints were smoked.15

  Fab believed that the king footed the bill as part of an elaborate public relations campaign. (The Moroccan embassy’s culture and media team did not respond to a request for comment.) Indeed, the drums of war were beating: in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States had invaded Afghanistan and was preparing to move into Iraq as well—and the instability, though quite far from Morocco, threatened to taint even the countries on the periphery of the Middle East. Hosting a very public birthday bash for one of America’s best-known celebrities seemed a means of reminding tourists that Morocco was still a safe vacation destination.16 After Diddy’s crew landed, the party continued for three days at the king’s palaces; guests were ushered around the country via motorcade and entertained by jugglers, acrobats, and snake charmers.17