50 Cent Singer

Rap performer 50 Cent will start a line of books published by Simon & Schuster based on his rhymes about drug dealing, street crime and expensive cars. The publisher will pair with parent company Viacom Inc.'s MTV division to issue a series of graphic novels and novellas starting in 2007 geared to young black readers, Pocket Books Publisher Louise Burke said Monday. 50 Cent, born Curtis Jackson, will be an advisor for the books, she said.

50 Cent said he was saddened by the fatal shooting at a theater where his movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " was playing. "I feel for the victim's family in this situation," 50 Cent said on ABC's "The View" on Friday. "But you know, these weren't kids. This was a 30-year-old man [who] had a dispute with three other guys." Shelton Flowers, 30, was shot at least three times Wednesday night after he got into an argument with another man inside a Loews multiplex just east of Pittsburgh.

THE name "50 Cent" and the words "modest success" just don't seem to go together for lots of reasons, but that's the best way to describe the early sales of the "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " soundtrack CD, which hit stores on Tuesday and is lagging well off the rapper's usually torrid sales pace. "It wasn't quite what some people expected," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard, the music industry trade publication. Early reports from retailers had the 18-track CD on pace to sell about 300,000 in its first week, although the release of the tie-in film on Wednesday should factor into its weekend performance.

50 CENT is about to walk a mile -- or is it eight? -- in the shoes of his mentor, Eminem. The rapper with the monetary moniker is both the star and the story of "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," which opens Wednesday, and he doesn't mind comparisons to "8 Mile," the 2002 film that put Eminem in theaters.

Rap feuds aren't usually about differing opinions on President Bush. However, that appears to be the case with 50 Cent and Kanye West. 50 Cent says he disagrees with West's remark that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," proclaimed during a September telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims. "I think people responded to it the best way they can," the rapper told ContactMusic.com. "What Kanye West was saying, I don't know where that came from."

Here's what you won't hear rapper 50 Cent say from the stage on the new MTV special, "The Life & Rhymes of ... 50 Cent": "I just want to know how many of you listen to Game's album. It was great, wasn't it? It was great because I wrote it!" The Game is a popular Compton rapper and the album is "The Documentary," one of the year's hottest CDs. MTV's idea was to present rapper 50 Cent as everything he usually is not. Confessional instead of combative. Stirring up nostalgia instead of trouble.

A behind-the-scenes look at this summer's Eminem-50 Cent "Anger Management" tour premieres at 5 p.m. today in a webcast on MTV Overdrive, part of MTV.com, six days ahead of its conventional telecast on the MTV cable channel. MTV officials describe the hybrid offering as a network television first.

To make himself a movie star and his life story a movie, the rapper 50 Cent had to revisit the day he was shot nine times by lying on freezing asphalt for three hours with a chest full of fake blood and bullet holes. For other scenes, he had to conjure up the walk and talk of his youth, when he was an orphaned kid living on a desperate boulevard in Queens, N.Y., where a beating or arrest could be around the corner. He even had to narrate the murder of his mother and the torching of her corpse.

Reebok International Ltd., the second-largest U.S. maker of athletic shoes, has withdrawn a commercial featuring rapper 50 Cent from British television after viewers complained that it glamorized guns. More than 50 TV viewers complained that the commercial "glamorizes and perhaps glorifies gun culture," Advertising Standards Authority spokeswoman Donna Mitchell said Thursday. In the commercial, 50 Cent counts from one to nine in reference to having been shot nine times.

Rapper 50 Cent's "The Massacre," which entered the national sales chart at No. 1 on March 9 after selling 1.14 million copies in its first four days in the stores, holds on to the top chart spot after selling 771,000 more copies last week. With that success, 50 Cent's extended musical family on Interscope Records claims three spots in the Top 10, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Compton rapper the Game, who is part of 50 Cent's rap group G-Unit, holds the No.