It is reminiscent of the UK's great Blur v Oasis standoff of 1995: A gritty, name-calling, blue-collar artist, 50 Cent, is going toe to toe with the more middle-class, metropolitan Kanye West. It's pure showbiz, but this is also a skirmish for the heart of hip hop. 50 Cent is the last of the great gangsta rap entrepreneurs. From the age of 12 he dealt drugs in Queens. Journalists routinely demand he show them the wounds from when he was shot nine times in 2000. (I once asked him if he suffered from post-traumatic stress. 'Nah,' said 50. 'That's for regular people.')
Hip hop has always been a gladiatorial genre, and few have exploited that as well as 50. Part of his mystique comes from wrecking the career of rival Queens rapper Ja Rule, who claimed to be tougher . 'You livin' fantasies nigga, I reject your deposit/ When your lil' sweet ass gon' come out of the closet?' rhymed 50 in a famously homophobic 'diss'.
Two years ago he opened hostilities with West: 'I feel like Kanye West is successful because of me. After 50 Cent, they was looking for something non-confrontational, and they went after the first thing that came along.'
Both write chart-friendly hip hop; both, too, are immensely convinced of their own abilities - West perhaps even more so than 50. But the difference between them is also vast. If 50 Cent played magnificently to the middle-class CD buyer's prejudices that all great black rap artists must be a) from poor broken homes, and b) scary, West is having none of that. His music is at heart conservative, retooled r'n'b, but his content is curiously radical. West is middle-class and unashamed. He has turned his back on the ghetto posturing which has, in effect, become hip hop's minstrel show.
Dressing in chartreuse polo shirts or suits, West is ridiculously un-hip hop - and clearly doesn't care. He has no problem admitting that his mother was an English professor at Chicago State University. (50's mother was a crack dealer - murdered when he was eight.) More radically, West has revived the kind of Civil Rights-era political stance which hip hop rendered unfashionable. While 50 Cent is a fan of George Bush, hailing him as a fellow 'gangsta', West upset the cart during a televised benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina by declaring: 'George Bush doesn't care about black people.' He has also lifted the lid on hip hop's greatest taboo, calling for an end to homophobia while talking movingly on TV about the discovery that his cousin was gay.
So you'd be forgiven for thinking that this beef is about the nasty thug assaulting the preppy toff. But that's not the way it happened.
In fact it was Kanye West who deliberately engineered this latest hip hop spat. In July his label moved the release of Graduation to 11 September to clash with 50 Cent's Curtis. In hip hop terms, that was a provocation. Goaded, 50 Cent reacted on cue by saying: 'Let's raise the stakes. If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on 11 September, I'll no longer perform music.'
From his own track record, it was a fair bet. 50 Cent's last album The Massacre sold 1.14m in its first week in stores - almost 300,000 more than West's last, Late Registration. But 50 Cent appears to have stumbled. So far the maths says that by Tuesday, West will have sold between 75,000 and 150,000 more than 50 Cent's estimated 550,000 copies. It's hardly a decisive, knockout blow. And don't for a minute believe that 50 Cent is really going to retire. He has already started blaming his record company for the failure. But it looks for the moment as though Kanye West has again beaten hip hop at its own game.
· Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood by William Shaw is published by Bloomsbury
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