50 Cent’s ‘Many Men’ Joins Spotify Billions Club
The track comes from the rapper’s debut album ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin’.’
“Many Men” has many streams. The 2003 track from 50 Cent’s debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ has reached one billion streams on Spotify, joining the Spotify Billions Club.
The song was produced by Darrell “Digga” Branch, Eminem, and Luis Resto. Despite its success, the song was never actually released as an album single. The track peaked at number 11 on the US Bubbling Under R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart and has been certified Gold in the US by the RIAA.
Digga spoke to Okayplayer about how his beat made it into 50 Cent’s hands: “I created the beat probably two or three years before it was released on an album… We made tracks and it didn’t really move so then I tried to get some tracks to Nas… He picked two tracks and that was one of them…50 was in a Nas session and he heard the track and he heard the track and liked it. He got Lenny Nicholson, the A&R at Sony at the time, to give him a copy so he would write to it.”
Album producer Sha Money XL additionally shared: “That was a track where 50 came to the crib with it and he was like ‘I got this joint.’ He had the whole song and we recorded it in my basement. We took it to Detroit and I spent about a week or two with Eminem and we mixed ‘Many Men’ and ‘High All The Time’ with Em. Em made that mix really tight and put all the sound effects on it. He made it a movie.”
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“Many Men” was prominently featured in author Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. As Vuong told The Paris Review: “50 Cent’s song was ubiquitous in the early aughts, where so much of this book takes place. It also marked the last era of gangsta rap, whose cultural framework provided men and boys a means of performing masculinity while also reducing it to erroneous tropes of misogyny and violence.”
