What follows is an unabridged version of the story that appears in our July issue.

For the moment, 50 Cent is preaching to the choir. While a gaggle of assistants and security personnel lounge around a Manhattan recording studio, their multiplatinum benefactor discourses on how violent films like Scarface and GoodFellas have a greater potential negative impact on kids than hip-hop does. "That's right, uh-huh," echoes G Unit capo Tony Yayo, like a grumpy, possibly armed Ed McMahon.

Then, suddenly, 50 walks over, puts his face an inch away from mine and says, "Ask me if I'm a role model?"

Are you?

"No, but I'm inspiring to people." He grins and turns away, inscrutable point apparently made.

With the delayed September release of his third album, Curtis, the rapper born Curtis Jackson on July 6, 1975, in South Jamaica, Queens, is desperately hoping to inspire a downloading public that is purchasing far less music than when he released his first two albums -- 2003's Get Rich or Die Tryin' and 2005's The Massacre, which sold almost 20 million copies combined. Curtis' first two singles ("Straight to the Bank," "Amusement Park") have yet to become the soundtrack of the summer. His acting career, though busy of late -- the war drama Home of the Brave with Samuel L. Jackson, prison-boxing flick The Dance with Nicolas Cage, and drag-racing vehicle Live Bet -- has met with critical yawns. And even though the G Unit empire (a stable of rappers, a clothing line, shoe deal, books, video game, a recently sold stake in VitaminWater) earned $41 million from June 2005 to June 2006, 50 knows that if he wants to remain "rap's MVP," as he boasted on the hit single "Hate It or Love It," he has to stay as edgily focused as ever.

You're 32 now, and as you get further away from life on the street, does it get harder to reconcile who you are on record with who you are in real life? On the new album, you still rap about cooking crack and shooting people, but you've been living in a mansion in Connecticut.
Your experience is your life; the things you go through make you who you are. So I've spent four years being what people call "successful," and all the rest of my life not having it. And maybe because of that, the painful moments are more visible in my memory. If I'm writing about the environment I grew up in, then guns are gonna be goin' off. Now they haven't gone off around me in real life as much as they have in my music because I haven't been able to capture real life perfectly in my music. A lot of my songs are like a record that's skipping. I've been repeating these scenarios until I do them perfectly.

That gunshot sound has been going off on your records since well before Get Rich or Die Tryin'.
That's what I hear when I think of where I grew up. And it also comes from the experience of me being shot. It's weird -- people associate me with gun violence, when I was the one who got shot. I haven't ever shot anybody.

But everybody thinks you have.
Why?

Well, you've said so in interviews, both directly and indirectly, and you rap about it all the time.
That's an assumption; there's no proof I've ever shot anybody. What I think scares people about me is that I was shot nine times, and I'm okay with that. I accepted it and moved on, and it didn't slow me down. Being shot wasn't the most painful experience for me, anyway. The most painful experience was not knowing what I was going to do with my life after my record company didn't accept my phone calls anymore [Columbia dropped 50 in 1999 after the shooting].

That must have been devastating. You made this amazing record [Power of a Dollar] and you're excited to put it out, and then you're in the hospital and the album's shelved.
It was terrible. I was mad. I was scared.

And since you were shot in the mouth, you didn't know if you were gonna be able to rap again.
My voice was completely different. I had my teeth knocked out of the whole side of my mouth, and my tongue got bullet fragments in it. But it's funny -- this is the voice that everyone enjoys now. It's made me think that maybe it was God's plan, maybe I was supposed to be shot, because after that, I signed a publishing deal [with EMI] on my hospital bed. They gave me a $100,000 advance. But then they dropped me because they didn't realize I'd been shot in the face and might not physically be able to perform. They used it as a tax write-off, but I lived off that $100,000 during the time period when I was hurt and couldn't do music and provide for myself.

Did you have to completely rethink the way you rapped because of the injury? Before, your voice had more eagerness and intensity to it.
Everything changed. My mind frame changed. When all those things happened, the fun went out of my music.