"I ain't fresh out the hood/ I'm still in the hood," 50 Cent rhymes in "Fully Loaded Clip," feeling the heat even if he just sold 5 million copies of The Massacre a couple of years ago. He's out to prove he's everything he used to claim ("Still in da club, still sipping bub") while rocking "more whips than a runaway slave." Like The Massacre, Curtis divides between hard songs ("Man Down," "Fire," "I'll Still Kill") and soft songs ("Follow My Lead"), for the first time letting guests sing most of the hooks. Fiddy revisits old streets in "Straight to the Bank," produced by Ty Fyffe and Dr. Dre, while "Peep Show" brings back Eminem. "My Gun Go Off" has a metal-guitar hook a la "Party Like a Rock Star," "I'll Still Kill" lets Akon thug out, and the summer jam "I Get Money" takes off on Naughty by Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray." The down side? The I-need-love pop tunes are not getting any better, even with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake in the stripper ditty "AYO Technology." "Follow My Lead" is an inexplicable Robin Thicke duet ("Like Janet Jackson said, I miss you much/I really wanna feel your touch"), and "Amusement Park" is even sillier ("Watch me as I pull a rabbit out my hat/It won't be a rabbit, it'll be a gat"). Much better is "All of Me," with Mary J. Blige. Wailing, "I got a feeling like I'm fiending on crack," Blige steals the show without even trying.

“1999”

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.