50 Cent says Dr. Dre didn't want '21 Questions' on his debut album because it was too commercial
- 50 Cent said Dr. Dre didn't want "21 Questions" on his debut album because it was too commercial.
- "He said, 'I don't know why you want it?'" 50 recalled Dre saying to him.
50 Cent has said that Dr. Dre didn't want him to include the song "21 Questions" on his 2003 debut album, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," because it was too commercial.
During his recent appearance on "Big Boy's Neighborhood," 50, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, recalled Dre saying to him at the time: "He said, 'I don't know why you want it?'"
50 said Dre's dislike of the song came from his own experiences as a rapper with N.W.A, which, though enjoying commercial success in the late 1980s, rapped mostly about politics and gang culture.
"Dre would say, 'This is N.W.A. We didn't do that,'" continued 50. "But, like, they didn't have to reach to make a commercial record or anything that sounded like a commercial record. And that's just in his DNA. Like, on his path, he's like, 'We don't need that.'"
Ultimately, including "21 Questions" on 50's debut album proved to be the right call. The song scored 50 his second No. 1 hit on Billboard Hot 100, with it staying at the top of the charts for four weeks.
While "21 Questions" may have been a love song, most of the other tracks on "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" were much more hard-hitting, telling the story of the rapper's previous life as a drug dealer and how he was shot nine times and lived to tell the tale.