Terminate On Sight

That G-Unit’s second album was provisionally titled Shoot To Kill, then temporarily re-named Lock & Load, before the outfit eventually settled for Terminate On Sight, really says it all. Though mob imagery has long become de rigueur for commercially successful hip-hop artists, 50 Cent’s posse, G-Unit, take gangsta schtick to new levels of endurance.
They do just about enough to keep themselves entertained. Thus, we have ‘Rider Pt. 2’, on which Fiddy almost breaks the Auto Tune, ‘Casualties Of War’ where Banks boasts that he “shits like a dinosaur”, and ‘I Like The Way She Do It’, the synth-based lead single about an extraordinarily cooperative stripper.
Although Fiddy runs a billion dollar empire, he clearly doesn’t spend money on these basic, ‘Idiot’s Guide To Hip-Hop’-style beats. Moreover, T.O.S sounds like the work of a group for whom making music is a distraction. They mumble so monotonically from one song to the next you get the impression they’d rather just be out shooting people, having no-strings-attached sex and generally being millionaires.
Still, there’s nothing here to suggest that G-Unit’s latest release will do anything other than cement their place as one of the hottest hip-hop tickets around. Fiddy and co. stick to the script – guns, bitches, drugs, money, more guns – and in so doing deliver exactly the album their fans crave. How tedious, and frankly, how sad.

KEY TRACK: ‘STRAIGHT OUTTA SOUTHSIDE’