This year’s Anger Management Tour will supply a blockbuster bill, but as interesting as anything that will happen on stage is what’s happening in the careers of the tour’s two headliners – 50 Cent and Eminem.

Since being taken under the wing of Eminem, 50 Cent’s rise has been meteoric. His two albums – 2003’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” and 2005’s “The Massacre” – have sold a combined 16 million copies, a figure second only to Eminem’s numbers in rap history. Meanwhile, 50 Cent has also cultivated his own cast of artists, G-Unit and the Game (though he’s no longer on speaking terms with the latter), and expanded his brand to include a popular G-Unit clothing line, a shoe series for Reebok, adult videos, and energy drinks.

At this point, 50 Cent has mastered the pop game, and is now looking for new areas to dominate. Unsurprisingly, his next move will be to follow his mentor’s path to Hollywood. Advertisements are already cropping up for the November release of “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” a lightly fictionalized biopic styled after Eminem’s “8 Mile,” which employs much of the same creative team. “8 Mile” brought in some $130 million at the box office; expectations for “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” are almost as high.

But eager fans won’t have to wait that long to know 50’s life story. It arrives in book form tomorrow with “From Pieces to Weight,” an autobiography written with Kris Ex. The rough outlines – and they’re often quite rough – are these: Born Curtis Jackson, he was raised in Jamaica, Queens, by his mother, a drug-dealing lesbian who would ultimately be murdered by neighborhood rivals. The young Jackson encountered drugs early and often: first buying cocaine for his relatives, then selling it to them on behalf of local dealers.

Jackson dropped out of school in 10th grade to make his career in crack sales, and that’s likely where he would have ended up had he not been inspired to try his hand at rap by a chance encounter with Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC fame. He borrowed his nom de rap from a murdered Brooklyn gangster named 50 Cent. It was a fitting choice, as he was shot nine times at close range and nearly died.

By casting 50 Cent in his own life story, the film hearkens back to the older-style autobiopics of black athletes like Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. These, however, were simpler films: hagiographical and upbeat. 50’s success story is no less compelling, but its moral is far more ambiguous. He’s not so much apologizing for former misdeeds as celebrating them. The film’s only obvious lesson is captured by the Hemingway-esque line that ends the preview: “I’d rather die like a man than live like a coward,” says 50. A Horatio Alger story it isn’t.

The second storyline running beneath this year’s Anger Management Tour is Eminem’s rumored retirement from rap. In July, sources close to the rapper said that his latest album, “Encore,” would be his final one, and that he planned to retire from performing at the conclusion of the tour in September.

Eminem has since denied these reports – or muddied them anyway. “I’m gonna always make music, whether I’m just sittin’ behind the boards and producing and making beats and puttin’ my other artists out there, or if I do decide to do another tour or make another album,” he told MTV. “I know I’m not gonna be rapping forever. I know that much.”

It seems obvious that sooner or later, the world’s most successful rapper is looking to get out of the game. In this he’s hardly alone; rap is taking a turn towards the bourgeois. Jay-Z made a very public exit from rap last year, and is now working as the president of Def Jam Records. More and more, Russell Simmons and Dr. Dre are the models rappers aspire to, prizing stability over street credibility.

Eminem has already taken steps in this direction. He continues to develop talent for his Shady/Aftermath imprint and has turned his attention to producing, having learned the trade at the side of Dr. Dre himself. He’s done tracks for his own records as well as those of 50 Cent, D12, Obie Trice, and Tony Yayo, and is routinely mentioned in the same breath as hip-hop’s superstar producers. He’s even developed his own signature sound: a dense, nightmarish production style that evokes the darker themes in his lyrics.

What are we to make of all this? At first blush, these two careers seem to pull in opposite directions. 50’s criminal upbringing seems worlds away from the music-mogul position Eminem is carving out for himself. But in fact, they’re two sides of the same rap coin, more than comfortable sharing a stage. And an impressive one at that: no less than Madison Square Garden.

Until August 9 (4 Pennsylvania Plaza, 212-262-3352).

Managing the Talent

There’s plenty to recommend the third installment of the Anger Management Tour in terms of entertainment value alone. This year’s lineup features three of the biggest names in rap – which is to say, three of the biggest names in pop: Eminem, 50 Cent, and Lil Jon. The actual number of performers at Madison Square Garden tonight and tomorrow, however, will be many times that figure, as each will bring with him various underlings and associates. Lil Jon will be accompanied by the East Side Boyz and Miami rapper Pitbull; 50 Cent by longtime G-Unit associates Lloyd Banks, Tony Yayo, and Young Buck, as well as new recruits Mobb Deep and M.O.P.; and Eminem by his stage-crowding hometown crew D12 and new Atlanta protege Stat Quo.