Curtis

The third studio album came out on 11 September 2007. Dr. Dre, Eminem and Timbaland were among its producers. Before I Self Destruct was first meant to be the 2007 album, but 50 Cent pushed its release back and put out Curtis instead. The title went from Curtis to Curtis S.S.K., which stood for SoundScan Killer, and back again. He said he chose it because he was known as Curtis before he became famous, and that the record was inspired by his life before Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

Unlike the first two albums, which leaned on G-Unit artists, it brought in people he had not worked with before, among them Akon, Justin Timberlake, Mary J. Blige, Robin Thicke, Timbaland and Nicole Scherzinger. He wrote parts of it in his grandmother's old house in South Jamaica and flew to Florida to work on Ayo Technology with Timberlake. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 691,000 copies, behind Graduation, which sold 957,000 in the same week. Metacritic gives it 58 out of 100. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone wrote that it divides between hard songs such as Man Down, Fire and I'll Still Kill and soft songs such as Follow My Lead. Time put the single I Get Money at number six on its list of the 10 best songs of 2007. On Man Down, all references to police were censored on both the clean and explicit versions.