Ah, the Caribbean. Balmy weather, crystal-clear water, and strictly Sesame Street language unless you want to go to jail. According to TMZ, that’s exactly what happened to rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who was arrested Saturday on charges of profanity after dropping some f-bombs during his performance of “P.I.M.P.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, 50 Cent’s representative said that the artist “was only booked to host” the St. Kitts Music Festival, but that when he arrived “the festival organizers asked him to perform.” It was at this point that 50 Cent should have studied Eastern Caribbean Law instead of doing a sound check, which would have revealed that cursing in public is illegal in Saint Kitts and Nevis. This is sort of terrifying. What if someone stubs their toe and yells out “shit castle,” or is cut off in traffic and calls the offending driver a “blind horse-fucking lane Nazi”? There’s really no benign replacement for those.
The representative explained, “Unfortunately, they didn’t have the clean version [of 50 Cent’s] tracks, so there were profanities used” while he rapped along to the music. Of course, like any idiotic language restriction, the Caribbean is more concerned with the actual words used over the content of the song, which is about a stripper who 50 Cent meets at a club, woos by buying her a lot of stuff, and then threatens to beat up if she has a problem with his other women. Then, the pimping metaphor becomes even more literal, with 50 Cent saying one of his women needed stitches after her last client assaulted her. But apparently the word “fuck” is all that’s unsavory here.
Anyway, it’s expected that the rapper will pay a small bail. In 2003, DMX was arrested for the same thing and only had to pay $376. Clearly, this will be a lesson well learned by 50 Cent about avoiding naughty words when describing deplorable subject matter.