10 Musicians Whose Careers Were Destroyed By Just One Album

Remember 50 Cent?

It may seem hard to believe for modern rap fans, but there was a time when you could find him in the club, indiscriminately and uncritically celebrating the same drug-fulled excess which contemporary hitmakers such as Future moodily dwell upon nowadays.

Early noughties rap had no need for such sensitive soul-searching, and the braggadocious artist formerly known as Curtis Jackson scored huge mainstream hits near the turn of the millennium with his hyper aggressive, un-ironically "gangsta" persona.

Riding the wave of glam rap’s peak popularity, the rapper seemed unstoppable circa the release of his debut studio effort, the phenomenally successful Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

However, when he promised to retire should his third studio album sell less copies than that of then-rising star Kanye West, he badly misjudged the cultural climate.

Corny machismo was out and Kanye’s sensitive backpacker pop rap was the defining sound of the genre for the remainder of the decade and beyond. As for Curtis? A string of failures followed the underperformance of his critically derided record Curtis, prompting many former fans to note that he should have stuck with that retirement promise.