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The Great Hip-Hop Bake-Off!It's Kanye vs. 50—but is the era of rap superstardom over?

By Jonah WeinerPosted Thursday, Sept. 6, 2007, at 3:44 PM ET

Kanye West and 50 Cent. Kanye West and 50 CentLast month, Forbes released its first-ever ranking of hip-hop's highest earners—or, as the magazine calls them, "Cash Kings." A few days later, Cash Kings No. 1 (Jay-Z, annual income $34 million), No. 2 (50 Cent, $32m), No. 3 (Diddy, $28m), and No. 8 (Kanye West, $17m) joined No. 12 (T.I., $16m) onstage at Madison Square Garden for the hip-hop equivalent of a Super Friends cartoon.

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The assembly was unexpected and the setting unlikely: the New York installment of Screamfest, a teen-and-'tween-skewing R&B-and-hip-hop tour in its seventh year, whose organizers and attendees are generally partial to talent of the PG-13 variety. This typically means cocky MCs who don't mind playing the teddy bear and R&B cooers not above humping their lighting rigs for (slightly) naughty effect. Only T.I., the suave gangsta rapper from Atlanta, was officially part of the bill; the other visiting royals were gate-crashers at the prom, there to salute the buying power of the squealing high-school set.

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Hua Hsu called Kanye "Hip-Hop's Hamlet," while Sasha Frere-Jones hailed West as the genre's only savior in 2004. Jody Rosen noted how 50 Cent has built his career "beefing" with other MCs. If superstardom is over, make way for Akon and T-Pain: the "perfect Web 2.0 stars."

Never mind that they didn't do much besides grandstand, exchange awkward hugs, and, in a loose confederation, rhyme along with West's single "Can't Tell Me Nothing." This was rap history, a five-man monument to hip-hop superstardom. The implicit lesson, though, was that these days, it takes a team effort to create a hip-hop Event. For the cynical observer, the spectacle—five outsize personalities putting aside their egos to share the stage—might have brought to mind a variation on the old light-bulb joke: How many rap icons does it take to light up Madison Square Garden?

Hip-hop superstardom isn't quite what it used to be. The record industry's woes are every performer's headache at this point, but hip-hop has borne a particularly heavy load: T.I.'s fourth album, King, was the best-selling hip-hop release of 2006, but that wasn't enough to crack the year's overall Top 10. Indeed, the happiest stories to come out of hip-hop of late have been micro, not macro. Ring tones have become an indispensable revenue stream for rappers, making their songs far more omnipresent yet simultaneously marginalizing them (Kanye West's epic new single, now being switched to "vibrate" at a restaurant near you!). This year has also seen the proliferation of what you might call Web Cam Rap: regional dance crazes, adorned with minimal verse, that propagate via YouTube. The Aunt Jackie, from Harlem, began life as a fuzzy, streaming amateur video and earned its creator, Jason Fox, a major-label record deal. And more recently, Atlanta's Soulja Boy entered MTV's rotation with the video for his single-cum-dance-instructional, "Crank Dat," after hundreds of kids had already uploaded bedroom versions. In this context, Screamfest's ad hoc summit of titans seems a bit less like a victory lap and more like a rally on behalf on an endangered species.

The two titans with the most at stake, at least in the near future, are 50 Cent and Kanye West. Next week, both are gunning to create another hip-hop Event when they release their new albums, Curtis and Graduation, on the same day (Sept. 11, in an unhappy coincidence). Each has vowed that his first-week figures will best the other's. It's a great stunt: a superstar bake-off meant to drive music fans back into CD stores by adding a jolt of vote-for-your-favorite, American Idol-style excitement to the mundane ritual of plunking down cash for a piece of plastic. Despite some spitballs back and forth ("I'm King Kong, Kanye is human," 50 jabbed during a recent interview; in another, Kanye begged slyly, "Please, 50, don't retire once my album sells and beats your album"), things have remained remarkably civil. That's because this showdown is, at root, a strategic partnership: Both 50 and Kanye (and their parent company, Universal) are counting on the fact that many fans will buy both albums.

But it may take more than a well-publicized face-off to remain a larger-than-life star in such an inhospitable climate. The first two singles off 50's album were "Straight to the Bank," an uninspired bit of gloating, and "Amusement Park," which relied on a lukewarm, bedroom-as-Six Flags innuendo (sample groaner: "Your pass is valid all summer, my dear"). Radio took to neither, and Interscope, 50's label, pushed back Curtis' release several times before finally landing on Sept. 11. Time was, virtually every song 50 Cent recorded shot into the Top 10, sometimes two at once. Suddenly, the man who famously survived nine bullets seems anything but invincible.