21 Questions

"21 Questions" is a song performed by American rapper 50 Cent and Nate Dogg. The song was written by 50 Cent, K. Risto, J. Cameron, and V. Cameron for 50 Cent's commercial debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003). Released in 2003 as the album's second single, it became his second number one song in the United States, after "In Da Club". It reached #6 on the UK Singles Chart while "In Da Club" was at No. 23, giving him the rare feat of having two singles in the Top 30 at the same time. The track was produced by Chris styles and samples elements from Barry White's "It's Only Love Doing Its Thing". This was the only single from the album to not have the Parental Advisory sticker on its cover since the only profanity was the word "nigga" in the first verse.

Background

When producer Dr. Dre worked with 50 Cent on his debut album, he did not want the song on the album. According to 50 Cent, "Dre was, like, 'How you goin' to be gangsta this and that and then put this sappy love song on?'" 50 Cent responded saying, "I'm two people. I've always had to be two people since I was a kid, to get by. To me that's not diversity, it's necessity."

50 Cent

Curtis James Jackson III (born July 6, 1975), better known by his stage name 50 Cent, is an American rapper, actor, entrepreneur, investor, record, film, and television producer. Born in the South Jamaica neighborhood of the borough of Queens, Jackson began selling drugs at age twelve during the 1980s crack epidemic. Although he left drug-dealing to pursue a musical career, he was struck by nine bullets in a 2000 shooting. After Jackson released the compilation album Guess Who's Back? in 2002, he was discovered by Eminem and signed by Shady Records, Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records.

With the aid of Eminem and Dr. Dre (who produced his first major-label album, Get Rich or Die Tryin'), Jackson became one of the world's best selling rappers and rose to prominence with East Coast hip hop group G-Unit (which he leads de facto). In 2003 he founded G-Unit Records, signing his G-Unit associates Young Buck, Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo. Jackson had similar commercial and critical success with his second album, The Massacre, which was released in 2005. He released his fifth studio album, Animal Ambition, in 2014 and is working on his sixth studio album: Street King Immortal, scheduled for release in 2016.

Question

A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested should be provided in the form of an answer.

Questions have developed a range of uses that go beyond the simple eliciting of information from another party. Rhetorical questions, for example, are used to make a point, and are not expected to be answered. Many languages have special grammatical forms for questions (for example, in the English sentence "Are you happy?", the inversion of the subject you and the verb are shows it to be a question rather than a statement). However questions can also be asked without using these interrogative grammatical structures – for example one may use an imperative, as in "Tell me your name".

Uses

The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed, by indicating, more or less precisely, the information which the speaker (or writer) desires. However questions can also be used for a number of other purposes. Questions may be asked for the purpose of testing someone's knowledge, as in a quiz or examination. Raising a question may guide the questioner along an avenue of research (see Socratic method).

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses the major cities and metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas. The Bay Area's nine counties are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. Home to approximately 7.44 million people, the nine-county Bay Area contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks, connected by a network of roads, highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels and commuter rail. The combined statistical area of the region is the second-largest in California (after the Greater Los Angeles area), the fifth-largest in the United States, and the 43rd-largest urban area in the world.

The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does not use the nine-county definition of the San Francisco Bay Area. The OMB has designated a more extensive 12-county Combined Statistical Area (CSA) titled the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area which also includes the three counties of San Joaquin, Santa Cruz, and San Benito that do not border San Francisco Bay, but are economically tied to the nine counties that do.