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Earlier this week, an overseas interview with 50 Cent hit the Web in which he said his upcoming LP, Black Magic, would have a different feel.

"I went to a nightclub afterparty," 50 told reporter Jonas Pettersen. "It's a little different music going on before I got there. They play your music when you come. But the music they played before they started playing a lot of what I created was more uptempo, more dance. I wanted to make a song like that. So I went into the studio. Because I'm traveling with my live band, I took my band with me and sequenced it and recorded the actual record while I was out there. I did two other songs I had production for. I had been writing those songs for a while. So I finished them and recorded them while I was out."

The G-Unit General is leaning toward dance music? Fif says not so fast. He clarified his creative direction when he called into U.K. DJ Tim Westwood's show the other day.

"Well, I had a lot of coffee so my stomach is definitely battling it out. But I don't know if that's nervousness or what," he laughed. "It's going to be a bit strange, because this is my first show, and it's at South By Southwest, and it's opening for Hole. But it's kind of a jump-into-the-deep-end kind of thing. I want to get it under my belt so I can move on."

Oh yeah, we forgot the entire opening-for-Hole thing, but it's true that Stump will debut his solo project on a bill that also features the roaring return of Courtney Love's Hole — which only kind of adds another level of pressure to things. But to hear him tell it, Stump can't wait to get onstage tonight at the Dirty Dog Bar — and in keeping with the whole "solo artist" vibe, he'll be going it alone.

"Tonight I'm going to be playing everything myself. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while. The video I posted online kind of foreshadowed it," he said. "It's kind of great because you can improvise with yourself. It's way more complicated than I imagined it would be, so I kind of composed around it. I'll have my guitar, and I'm going to try and play the saxophone, plus some other stuff. I didn't bring the trumpet with me, but now I'm thinking I probably should have."

"With Ludacris, pretty much every track he's ever featured on sounds amazing," Cruz told MTV News. "I gave him a quick call and asked him if he could get on the record, and he recorded it and sent it over. As I expected, there was nothing I needed to change. It sounded perfect."

It's also worth noting that Luda's verse helped Cruz clarify just how to pronounce his first name correctly. "He put my name in there, which is great — so people know to pronounce it now properly, hopefully," Taio (pronounced "Tie-O") said.

Cruz released his second album in the U.K., Rockstarr, last year, and now has his sights set on the States. Also impressive is the fact that he has songwriting game, a talent that has recently seen him penning tracks for a couple of artists you may recognize.

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Bieber's video for "Baby" had him bowling alongside Drake and Ludacris. So what plans does he have in store for the "U Smile" clip? Well, first he has to decide to shoot a video for it. "We haven't shot it yet," he said, adding that he's not the guy to ask about any concepts that may be floating around. "I don't know. I don't do the visual projects. I'm just a singer."

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