In all honestly, it's always been an average album.....Exalted because of 50's hype and our age at the time, for many reasons...I could write a fukking thesis on this album, and how i played throughout my life in 2003, junior in high school, hotels where I partied for days, 'Get Rich Or Die Trying' on an XBOX, along with all the rest of 50's mixtapes, in every car I got into, or rode passenger in, smoking a blunt at the beach, or leaving school, this album was an omnipresent soundtrack to my life, whether I wanted it or not, it was inescapable. I shot my boy the connect on AIM for the bootleg, and he burned dozens of copies, and we split the money. I rode around scheming with my boys listening to 'Heat', watched girls strip and dance to '21 Questions', and 'PIMP', on hotel beds when I was 16....I have memories of friends that died listening to this with them in the car, speeding down the freeway.... 'Get Rich Of Die Trying' is forever embedded in my memories.....
The album though....There are some indisputable bangers, 'What Up Gangsta', 'Many Men', among them.....But, it's formulaic and very dated by Aftermath production, Eminem, and 50 himself. It's paint by the numbers music.....The weed track, the club track, the diss track, the love song, the 'Heaven' song.....Banks murders his verse on 'Don't Push Me', but i can't suffer through Eminem much in 2016. Or 2010, for that matter. It aged instantly to me, and even by Fall 2003, the only tracks I really played were 'What Up Gangsta'...Some great production, and a lot of really average productions, and this is where 50 is exposed as not having much to say.....I liked 'The Massacre' better, though as an album it's bloated and marred by commercial attempts, the content is much better, and the production more varied.