Right about now, we’re thinking 50 Cent would have rather been in da club than on da stage.
The chart-topping hip-hopster cut short his set at Britain’s Reading Festival over the weekend after getting booed and pelted with plastic bottles by a hostile audience just minutes after he began performing.
Accompanied by his G-Unit crew, 50 Cent hadn’t even taken the stage at the legendary U.K. music bash on Sunday evening when the cranky crowd of 55,000 began yelling insults at the former crack peddler and hurling plastic cups.
Things got even worse when the lights came up on 50 Cent and he began performing tracks off his 2003 breakthrough, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, according to NME.com. Fiddy’s attempts to chill out the audience went nowhere-the boos got louder and the deluge of bottles intensified.
“We’re just all here to have fun,” said the rapper, whose real name Curtis Jackson.
The audience was having so much fun at that point that they began chanting “50 Cent is a wanker.” One angry festivalgoer even lobbed a folding chair on stage. A frustrated Fiddy fought back, throwing bottles back at the crowd and flipping the bird. But after 25 minutes, he decided to throw in the towel and make an early exit.
He wasn’t the only one to receive such a poor reception. The Rasmus barely made it through its first song when the fun-loving Brits on hand began lobbing mud at the Finnish rockers, who quickly exited stage right, according to NME.com.
Fiddy was one of the few hip-hop acts on display at Reading, the Streets and Goldie Lookin’ Chain being the others. Traditionally a bastion for rock ‘n’ rollers, the fest’s weekend roster included such name-brand acts as the White Stripes, the Darkness, Morrissey, Franz Ferdinand and Green Day, which closed out Sunday’s lineup.
It’s been quite an eventful tour of the U.K. for 50 Cent.
According to British media reports, after playing London’s Wembley Arena on Saturday, the rapper went to the trendy Leicester Square-based Circque club. Before he could get in the club, he saw that a fight had broken out among a few dozen wannabe gangstas outside and ordered his driver to ditch the scene, leaving behind members of G-Unit already inside. Cirque’s owners reportedly blamed the rapper for drawing the wrong kind of crowd, which touched off the melee.
It’s not the first club brawl involving Eminem’s protg.
Back in May, 50 Cent was playing at an invitation-only hip-hop concert at a Boston nightclub when he was hit by another water bottle and jumped into the crowd with his posse. The scuffle didn’t escalate beyond pushing and shoving, and Fiddy ended up finishing his song while two men were charged with disturbing the peace.
On the brighter side, 50 Cent is still generating plenty of coin, Sprint announced that music tones from Get Rich or Die Tryin’, including ringers for Fiddy’s hits “21 Questions” and “In Da Club,” has accounted for more than 500,000 downloads purchased since they went on sale six months ago.
