50 Cent has been in the game for a very long time, and yet he’s still achieving musical milestones over two decades into his career.
On Wednesday (December 14), the G-Unit mogul’s 2003 hit “In Da Club” surpassed one billion streams on Spotify (via Chart Data) – making it his first track to do so on the streaming platform.
The song will officially be 20 years old next month and its cultural relevance hasn’t waned. In July, the official music video surpassed 1.5 billion views on YouTube, making it the most popular 2000s rap video on the platform.
50 Cent also performed the classic cut during his surprise appearance at the Super Bowl LVI Pepsi Halftime Show in February, and even brought back the G-Unit tank top and headband he used to wear in the early 2000s.
.@50cent's "In Da Club" has now surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify. It's his first song to reach this milestone.
— chart data (@chartdata) December 13, 2022
When celebrating the track’s 18th birthday in 2021, 50 revealed it was still getting up to 1,000 spins a week on radio stations.
“Hey you ain’t gonna believe this one, but 18 years ago today i dropped a song i recorded in LA and it’s still spinning 1,000 times a week at radio,” he wrote on Instagram. “I tell @eminem i love him for what he did for me, he put me on.”
The video was shot in Los Angeles as well, and D12 rapper Bizarre recently shared a wild story about how the now-incarcerated Suge Knight tried to intimidate 50 on set.
“It was like a standoff,” Bizarre said in a conversation with Math Hoffa over the summer. “I know it sounds like a fucking made-up movie but it’s really true. We was shooting the ‘In Da Club’ video and somebody said, ‘Suge Knight here!’ And I was at the bar, gang was there … and they stopped and Suge came in with 30 Mexicans like you said, which is weird. And I just remember … Smurf or 50 was like, ‘What’s up man? Whatchu wanna do?’
“Suge looked at him and he took a puff of his cigar, and he blew it out and he did like this and he left,” Bizarre continued. “Just some LA-type shit, intimidation-type shit.”
As for his current simultaneous domination of the TV world, 50 Cent recently revealed that his next series will tell the story of infamous New York City crime boss Clarence “The Preacher” Heatley.
Clarence “The Preacher” Heatley started running his criminal gang in 1983. The organization sold drugs, and participated in extortion, kidnapping and even murder in New York City, all to make a name for The Preacher Crew. Heatley’s reign of terror was so violent that he was also known as The Black Head of Death.
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