Column: What would Fiddy do?

Twitter is, at times, a beautiful thing. In its short history it has been used to document the horrendous events of the Iranian election, bypass the censorship of several oppressive countries and, perhaps most importantly, keep Stephen Fry entertained whilst he was trapped in a lift. Despite this, there is also a dark side to twitter in which we see the very worst of the human psyche, or, to put it simply, 50 Cent has a twitter account.

As part of 50 Cent’s assault on all media (his quite frankly ludicrous videogame and emotionally void film didn’t seem to be enough), ‘Fiddy’ has decided to use twitter as another machine for self publicising. Though this works for most musicians, who tweet occasionally about recording some new song or some soppy nonsense about how much their fans mean, 50 Cent seems to record every single thought in his head. Rather embarrassing really as he is certainly no modern equivalent of Oscar Wilde. Almost every word typed seems to be about sex, money or the size of his penis, which he informs us, is rather large. Though this attitude from a rap artist shouldn’t surprise us, it’s all the more surreal and unsettling when not masked behind beats and occasional auto-tune.

The more you read his tweets, the more childish you see he is. Even beyond the ‘my dick’s bigger than yours’ mantra underlying a lot of his tweets, there are acts of rebellion even the most stereotypical of teenagers would scoff at for how much of a cliché they seem. In the past few weeks, he’s argued with Justin Beiber fans, told us when he’s planning to masturbate and in one instance, he complained that he’s too rich to be taking out rubbish for his grandmother. “Fuck this I’m going home I don’t need this shit”, he protests, showing that he’s less likely to be ‘In Da Club’ so much as in his room, screaming about his parents and how nobody appreciates his poetry.

Luckily for us, beyond the childish front lies the genuinely psychologically disturbing behaviour. You could compile Fiddy’s rambling and bind them, and lo and behold you have the ideal birthday present for Sigmund Freud. One tweet in particular has Fiddy telling us that he’s glad his manhood, or poodle as he calls it at times, doesn’t come off for fear that it would otherwise be stolen. A classic case of castration anxiety for you there Freud. Or maybe he is just a dickhead.

Stolen genitalia are nothing compared to the disturbing amounts of homophobia he’s allowed to post. Threatening to “shoot up” a gay wedding after Perez Hilton called Fiddy a douche bag was particularly shocking, even if it was passed off as a joke later on. Hilarious. One has to wonder if celebrity status is the only thing keeping his account from a ban. Although you wouldn’t have to wonder for very long.

Whichever way you look at it, his account can only serve to make what was already a vile self image even worse and, quite distressingly, has you empathising with the man who shot Fiddy nine times. (And now he walks with a limp.)

Tom Geddes, Music Columnist