He’s been enlisted to collaborate on a business book with 50 Cent, the multi-platinum-selling rapper whom Forbes magazine has called “a masterful brand builder and a shrewd businessman” and who famously survived being shot nine times. Law 27: Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult-like following.Īs his book’s influence spreads, author Robert Greene, a self-described “geeky white guy,” is fashioning himself into an unlikely consigliere to hip-hop’s elite. 48, you are saying: ‘Right, who is my first victim?’ ” “By the 44th, you have accepted the fact that you are basically immoral and so is the world. “By the 36th law, you start to feel unclean and worried about your own morality,” said one. Some reviewers had a different take when the book first appeared.
#Jay z on to the next one tatoo guy how to
“It teaches people in our demographic how to think more holistically about their business practices.” “The book is like a martial-arts manual for the business,” said Quincy “QD3" Jones III, a rap producer turned filmmaker who is making a feature documentary about “The 48 Laws’ ” hip-hop connection. Rappers write lyrics about the book (“The only book I ever read I could have wrote: ’48 Laws of Power,’ ” Kanye West rapped in a famous freestyle), they refer to it in interviews (“In ‘The 48 Laws of Power,’ it says the worst thing you can do is build a fortress around yourself,” Jay-Z noted in Playboy) and they study it as a guide to succeeding in the cutthroat music business.
The book became a bestseller (it was on the Wall Street Journal’s list for 11 weeks), and now, largely as a result of rap artists’ growing sense of themselves as an entrepreneurial warrior class, is finding new life as the bible for behavior in the hip-hop world. The two laws are found among “The 48 Laws of Power,” a 1998 book that bundles anecdotes from history’s great schemers - Casanova, Machiavelli, dancer and courtesan Lola Montez, Chairman Mao and con man “Yellow Kid” Weil among them - to make urgent points about how to come out on top in life.