It was 2004 and I was travelling to Flamborough Head with my Year 8 classmates under the strict instruction to, ‘look at some geography’. Our teacher, Mr Sugden, characteristically delivered a lecture pitched at university students, explaining why this stretch of Yorkshire coastline, conveniently located thirty miles from our school, was apparently world-beating.
As usual when discussing limestone, his eyes drifted orgasmically above our heads and into his eyelids, rendering him temporarily deaf to anything happening in front of him. This provided my good friend and I with the opportunity to repeatedly recite a line from a song we had become hysterically obsessed with.
Against the backdrop of Suggers describing how many millennia this plain, shitty rock we were stood on had taken to form, what we were discussing couldn’t have been more alien or inappropriate:
‘When I catch the bitch, Ima gangsta lean her…’
were the words we whispered to each other, with whoever had not said the first line taking their turn to dramatically lean backwards before quietly adding
‘WHOA!’
For my friend and I, this was the peak of comedy. A line packed with such enormous levels of controversy, whilst also being completely incomprehensible. Even today, I do not know what Young Buck meant in this section of ‘Footprints’ from G-Unit’s Beg for Mercy album.
What I do know is that, when I listened to this album recently during an otherwise unenjoyable run, the anticipation of this line brought a grin to my face that would not have looked out of place on a thirteen-year-old.
Now, I am aware that the paragraph above may rankle.
It feels slightly uncomfortable admitting that, as a fully grown adult, I still have such affection for a rap collective whose lyrics are frequently violent, sexist and ridiculous. Surely I should have developed more sophisticated influences by now. Surely my cultural reference points should aspire towards higher literary or moral ideals.
I know that my wife looks at me like I am a complete maniac when I suggest putting Beg for Mercy on in the car. Even before children, a suggestion that we play ‘Stunt 101′ or ‘Wanna Get to Know’ You would have found equivalence in playing Gary Glitter’s back catalogue.
To be fair, I understand her reaction. However, I think that she misses the point.
Although I don’t know him personally, I do not think Young Buck has ever actually ‘gangsta leaned’ anybody, whatever that might mean. In the same way that when he claimed the ‘ice in ma’ teeth keep the Cristal cold’, he was not revealing his true motivation behind wearing a grill.
G-Unit’s controversy is precisely what made them compelling.
Like Charles Bukowski argued, good poetry needs ‘juice’. Every line needs something to grab onto. Something to ‘suck on’.
G-Unit had the juice. They pushed all of the freedoms permitted by hip-hop culture in the naughties to their absolute limits to create songs which were packed with cordial.
If we take eight lines from 50 Cent’s verse in ‘Poppin’ them Thangs’, you will see my point:
‘Now take a look at how my lifestyle changed up
I’m on now, God dammit, I done came up
Now you can find me with the finest hoes
Choosin’ which whip to drive by what match my clothes
I got a fetish for the stones, I’m heavy on the ice man
If I ain’t got a pistol on me, sure I got a knife fam
Get out of line, and I’m lighting yo’ ass up
Semi-automatic spray I’ll tighten’ yo’ ass up – what?’
It is not Shelley or Byron, but it contains exactly what Bukowski was searching for. Every line has movement. Every image is exaggerated. Every boast is designed to make the listener stop and think: surely nobody can actually mean this?
That is precisely why it works. For a thirteen-year-old who, up until that point, had only experienced controversy through Limp Bizkit naming an album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water, 50 Cent telling us that his disposable income permitted him to have a car collection so varied he could pick a different one based on his outfit, felt beyond exciting. This, followed by the imagery that he will ‘light’ his enemies up and the final word ‘what?’ questioning the listeners’ bamboozlement at his cavalier approach to another person’s life, is what make G-Unit the zenith of Hip-Hop culture.
What is more powerful then writing a line about ending another man’s life?
If you take G-Unit as a collection of 3 naked American men and listen to the album, it’s impossible not to marvel at the world they imagine for you. It’s Tony Soprano with a diamond encrusted Rolex, brought up in the projects. It’s just beyond cool. Every line, every beat, is just controversial perfection.
And that’s before you get to the accents of these rappers. 50 Cent has this smooth, New York twanged clarity to his voice, that makes every line sound conversational and effortless. Lloyd Banks has a gravelly tone which reasons with your ear. Then there is Young Buck’s Tennessee accent which has the ability to bend words and make you feel like they’ve got new meaning.
If you tasked AI with creating a perfect trio, it wouldn’t produce the sounds that these men make, as their voices are just too interesting. There’s such a uniqueness to the way they perform their lines which elevates the meaning of their braggadocios content and persuades you of its authenticity.
That was the magic of G-Unit.
There is no world, parallel or otherwise, where you’d get a member of G-Unit dancing to one of their songs on TikTok or worrying about getting cancelled for hurting someone’s feelings. No. They lived in a world beyond boundaries in another Nirvana where the sun shines down on gangsters who endlessly reap the financial and sexual rewards for taking the ultimate risks with violence and drugs. Although they are controversial, you need to get past this, as G-Unit expanded our understanding of what life can be, real or imaginary.
You may feel that this piece is simply nostalgia. Just a man discussing something from a different time. However, for my small group of friends in York, the influence of G-Unit is anything but.
I have witnessed these men refuse to sing hymns at weddings because of self-consciousness, only to transform into G-Unit’s fourth member the moment one of the album’s songs begins. I have seen this group rap every word, eyes closed, mimicking those unmistakable accents and questionable sentiments.
This is not an attempt to project some exaggerated masculine ego, quite the opposite. The eyes are closed partly because we all know how embarrassing our enthusiasm for ‘The Unit’ actually is.
But it cannot be helped.
As soon as you have the Beg For Mercy hymn sheet memorised, it becomes impossible not to want to audition for the collective every time you hear them. Every song advertises its siblings. One track leads naturally into another until you have accidentally committed yourself to the entire album.
I can be completing the most mundane household task, but as soon as the algorithm selects a song from the album, I am in for the full nineteen. I know of very few albums that can do this.
The strangest part of all of this is that, when I have tentatively tried to discuss G-Unit with other men my age who I did not grow up with, there is often very little recognition. They may know one song. They may recognise the famous ‘G-UNIT!’ slogan. But I have rarely met anyone who remembers them without prompting. For many people, they simply were not part of their childhood.
It feels as though Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s marketing strategy in the UK was accidentally designed for teenage dweebs in York. If that was the case, I am eternally grateful as this group of men’s talent could only blossom in this very specific time period. Born twenty years earlier, and they would have rapped over the unpolished, pots and pans beats of the eighties. Born twenty years later and their ideas would have been cleaned and sanitised, with the album distilled into chopped up bits of nothing to suit an algorithm. It would have been reduced into fragments designed to capture attention rather than demand it.
The ideas they discussed and the people who made the instrumentals also only had a very narrow window to come into existence. Produced just two years later and one of the integral producers, Scott Storch, would have been in the throws of a cocaine addiction and produced two years earlier and the iconic, ‘Free Yayo!’, line would have been unnecessary as he’d be free.
In a world where watches now double as ECG machines and I can no longer eat bacon without someone explaining why I shouldn’t, I am grateful that I can still return to the music of my childhood and find a reference point for what living could look like.
Not because I believe everything they said.
Not because I want the world they described.
But because G-Unit used their brief window where freedom of expression and technological innovation combined to permit gangster rap to be gangster, crucially, without caveat.
Tomorrow's Chip Paper 