Feb. 21 issue - On a sunny Saturday morning, the buff-and-cut Curtis Jackson—you know him as 50 Cent—has finished his grueling workout in a Beverly Hills gym. Now he's sitting there by a small stereo, eyes closed, head bent, shoulders hunched, swaying back and forth. He likes grooving to music—particularly his own. "This one's the s--t," he says, and opens his eyes. It's a track called "Baltimore Love

Thing," from his sophomore album, "The Massacre," which hits stores early next month. It sounds at first like that old-school LL Cool J joint "I Need Love"—until you realize it's not a boy-girl love story, but rather the bond between heroin and a suffering addict. "I'm always coming with something different," he says. "Something no one would ever suspect. Just because people know my story doesn't mean they know me.''

The audience was having so much fun at that point that they began chanting "50 Cent is a wanker." One angry festivalgoer even lobbed a folding chair on stage. A frustrated Fiddy fought back, throwing bottles back at the crowd and flipping the bird. But after 25 minutes, he decided to throw in the towel and make an early exit.

He wasn't the only one to receive such a poor reception. The Rasmus barely made it through its first song when the fun-loving Brits on hand began lobbing mud at the Finnish rockers, who quickly exited stage right, according to NME.com.

Fiddy was one of the few hip-hop acts on display at Reading, the Streets and Goldie Lookin' Chain being the others. Traditionally a bastion for rock 'n' rollers, the fest's weekend roster included such name-brand acts as the White Stripes, the Darkness, Morrissey, Franz Ferdinand and Green Day, which closed out Sunday's lineup.

Headlines • First Look • The Dotted Line • E! News
50 Cent Booed Off Stage

by Josh Grossberg
Aug 31, 2004, 2:15 PM PT

Right about now, we're thinking 50 Cent would have rather been in da club than on da stage.

The chart-topping hip-hopster cut short his set at Britain's Reading Festival over the weekend after getting booed and pelted with plastic bottles by a hostile audience just minutes after he began performing.
Accompanied by his G-Unit crew, 50 Cent hadn't even taken the stage at the legendary U.K. music bash on Sunday evening when the cranky crowd of 55,000 began yelling insults at the former crack peddler and hurling plastic cups.

Things got even worse when the lights came up on 50 Cent and he began performing tracks off his 2003 breakthrough, Get Rich or Die Tryin', according to NME.com. Fiddy's attempts to chill out the audience went nowhere--the boos got louder and the deluge of bottles intensified.