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Introduction
There is a long tradition in popular music lyrics of using sugar or candy to evoke something desirable, including 'I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)' by the Four Tops (1965), 'Sugar, Sugar' by the Archies (1969), 'Brown Sugar' by the Rolling Stones (1971) and 'Candy Girl' by New Edition (1983), among others. This tradition is still alive and well. Christina Aguilera had a big hit in 2006 with the song 'Candy Man'. Madonna's 11th studio album was released in 2008 with the title Hard Candy, and she visited Europe, on her follow-up Sweet and Sticky Tour in the summer of 2009. The candy shop is many people's childhood dream but a place of temptation and hazard as well - we all had parents who knew that its contents were not good for us. As a metaphor, the candy shop also suggests a world far removed from everyday life; for most of us, anyway, real life is not a candy shop, where we can enter when we want and pick whatever we like from a vast supply of temptations. The candy shop, in the end, is as much a fantasy as a reality. In this article we will visit the rapper 50 Cent's 'Candy Shop', which is filled with both ear candy and eye candy, although they may not all be so sweet.1
In this article I will examine the different characters 50 Cent performs in the video, in terms of their relationship to his own masculinity. I will then explore how these aspects of masculinity carry over into the musical realm. I will characterise his vocal style and examine how it contributes to the characters played out in the video and the overall macho image of the artist. I will then turn to the subject of masculinity and exotic framing, in this case presented by a group of female dancers and a short melodic flute and string riff played in Phrygian mode, which evokes spectres of the exotic. I will further consider the conflicting expressions of masculinity that accompany the male body on display, focusing on how 50 Cent works to resolve them. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of 50 Cent's...