ABSTRACT
In his memoir, From Pieces to Weight, the rapper Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 Cent defends his choice to show his wounds to the media.2 Shot nine times at close range in 2000, Jackson has become a symbol of hip hop’s tangles with violence. At the same time his miraculous and bewildering survival has elevated him to folk hero status usually reserved for deceased rappers. Situating himself, not as a tattle tale, but rather as a ghetto bard who bellows the truth of urban violence on behalf of all those who have been silenced by it, Jackson carefully attempts to differentiate the media’s exploitation of his gunshot wounded body with his own media displays of his wounds: “I let you know that I survived nine bullets, because it’s the truth,” he writes, “but it’s been turned into a gimmick.”3 Acknowledging the power of that gimmick, he nonetheless disputes its ability to contain his experience, or that of other young black men. Demanding his own humanity, he reclaims the bodily pain of this experience, pain that as he points out has been excised from the media representations of his wounded body:
It hurt. Bad. I mean it hurt hurt-really bad . . . It may not seem that bad because it’s been packaged into a phrase that you come across in every story about me-‘the bullet-riddled rapper who was shot nine times’—but it doesn’t hold the weight, the pain, or the hope of my experience. It just can’t.4
