Could 50 Cent be a spent force?

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

Sources

‘Eastern Promises’ reteams Viggo Mortensen and David Cronenberg in a violent tour de force

Scorsese and De Niro.

Fellini and Mastroianni.

John Ford and the Duke.

And now … David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen?

After working on only two films together, the partnership of Canada’s master of the grotesque and Aragon from “Lord of the Rings” is starting to resemble those other world-class director/actor collaborations.

First there was 2005’s “A History of Violence,” a seething drama about a family man with an ugly secret past that garnered rave reviews, two Oscar nominations and slots on many of the year’s best-of lists.

Now it’s “Eastern Promises,” a stomach-churning melodrama set inside the violent world of London’s Russian mob. The film opens Friday.

Cronenberg and Mortensen don’t just make memorable movies together. As they made clear in two recent phone interviews, they view themselves as cinematic and fraternal soul mates.

“I consider myself quite fortunate to do back-to-back movies with him,” Mortensen said. “It’s unusual in this business to find yourself on the same wavelength as a director.

“Plus, David is just starting to hit his stride. Usually someone who’s been making movies for 30 years starts to tire, but his curve keeps going up and up. It’s almost like he’s getting younger and more adventurous with every movie.”

Cronenberg is no less complimentary of his leading man.

“Viggo is just a lovely person, a sweetheart,” Cronenberg said.

“He has a wonderful sense of humor that is bizarrely similar to my own. We’re more like brothers, really, and that makes for a very close artistic collaboration. It’s not something you have to have to make a movie, but I do believe it gives us a much higher platform from which to launch.”

Both men are sticklers for research.

Cronenberg learned all he could about the Russian mob, which he describes as “capitalism in its most predatory form.”

“Here’s what happened after the fall of communism,” Cronenberg said. “You had a system of police and athletes supported by government, and suddenly that support was gone. Say you’re a karate expert training for the Olympics. You know discipline, you don’t fear violence, you thrive on camaraderie.

“Suddenly there’s no money for the Olympics, so you turn to crime, along with lots of other athletes, former military and KGB guys. You still have your old skills, only now you use them to earn money illegally.

“But whereas Western capitalism had 500 years to work out the kinks and cover up its brutal origins, the Russian mob is still an infant. They don’t just kill their enemies … unlike the Mafia, they go after their enemies’ wives, children, mothers. Sicily is pretty refined compared to Siberia.”

Russian gangsters, Cronenberg said, are a case study in capitalism in its most basic and brutal form.

“We’re shocked at the behavior of certain CEOs,” he said, “whereas we ought to consider it simply the natural outcome of this particular system.”

Meanwhile Mortensen was throwing himself into researching the role of Nikolai, the immaculately groomed driver and “fixer” for a London-based Russian crime family. He learned to speak Russian (about half his dialogue is delivered in that language, with English subtitles). He went to Russia to help him imagine the life his character led.

“The most fun I have is creating a back story for my characters,” Mortensen said. “My first question is always what happened to this man between the cradle and page one of the script? The answer to that question is usually very long and complicated and never fully explained … but it colors all aspects of my performance.”