From Pieces to Weight review

So recently I got a chance to check out this new Fiddy Cent book. Obviously, for anyone who follows this nonsense, its release was surrounded by no small amount of contentious back and forth. Hashim suggests that this is nothing more than a silly vanity project designed to capitalize on this current state of Fiddy Cent uber-alles, while kris ex insists that he was paid for this, gotdamnit!

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that they're both right.

Here's the thing: This book could've been good anyway. Granted, the dude's only 29 years old, and people who write their memoirs before the age of 50 should only catch AIDS. But then he used to be heavily involved in drugs. I think most of us have had evenings that would make for a compelling book thanks to the involvement of drugs and alcohol, let alone an entire childhood and adolescence.

The problem, then, is that this book is so wholely bereft of interesting details. The first 180 or so pages of it read like this: My cousin [insert obviously fake name here] gave me some crack, which I then sold and used the proceeds to buy even more crack. Eventually, I had enough money to buy a car. Then here's the last 20: I started putting out mixtapes, then I met Dr. Dre and Eminem, then I got rich and famous.

Obviously anyone who's been following this dude's career for the past like 6 years now is going to have all kinds of questions about his past. So many of these go mostly unanswered. Here are a few examples of what you won't read in From Crack to More Crack:

A) Fiddy's moms used to be a big ol' dyke, right? Here, that's only hinted at. Surely, there must have been some incident in which a young Fiddy walked in on his mother getting busy with another woman. In fact, I'm pretty sure he wrote a song about it.

B) Didn't Fiddy's mom Big Brenda, or whatever her name was, get whacked by drug dealers connected to Murder Inc? Oh, you just know he wasn't about to go there in this book. Even though he's so obviously an expert on drug dealers (ever heard Ghetto Qu'ran?), these were drug dealer ninjas that got his momma.

C) His dead gay crack dealer mother's eight or fourteen brothers and sisters, who all lived in the same house with the young Fiddy, were apparently all crackheads and some also veterans (worse!). Clearly, something interesting happened in this house between 1976 and whenever he moved out, probably fairly recently. You ain't gonna read about it here though.

D) I'm assuming those same ninjas that got Fiddy's momma also got Jam Master Jay. In what was easily the most ridonkulous part of the whole book, Fiddy spends pages going on about how silly the NYPD was to assume that he had something to do with Jay's murder. As if he's not an ex-drug dealer with a hit out on his life who was supposed to be meeting JMJ the night he was killed. Yeah, entirely unlikely.

E) Finally, how come all of the names of the drug dealers in this are right out of a motherfucking Archie's comic book. (Seriously, I think one of them was even named Jughead). Has kris ex ever read any Nick Tosches? Does it make him tear up a bit when he does?

Which is not to say that I found this a complete waste of my time. Some of his various todos in the drug biz are genuinely suspenseful and compelling. If you're interested in reading about that sort of thing, Lord knows you could do a lot worse than this. Still, there's a great book that's yet to be written about the drug kingpin that becomes the rap kingpin.