Fat Joe: Jealous One’s Envy Album Review

One day, while Tupac was locked up at the Clinton Correctional Center in upstate New York, Joe went on the radio and made a joke about the incarcerated rap star. Apparently, the Puerto Ricans affiliated with Joe in the same prison took this as bullshit and started harassing Pac to defend Joe’s honor. So Pac, behind bars, made a pleading call to Joe to calm him down. ¹

Another time, in Los Angeles, Fat Joe was hanging out with Westside Connection’s Mack 10 for a Sprite commercial shoot. Common, who had previously been involved in a historically acidic beef with Ice Cube and Westside Connection until Louis Farrakhan eased tensions, was there and got into an altercation with the crew. Apparently things were about to escalate violently until Fat Joe, aka Joey Crack, intervened and saved Common’s life. ²

Speed ​​around time. Fat Joe not only booked Biggie for his very first concert – at The Fever in the Bronx – but also recorded an unreleased joint album with Big before his death, filled with no-holds-barred Tupac splinter records. ³

When NBA winger Stephen Jackson was a rookie, Fat Joe secretly had two Puerto Rican heavyweights follow him around New York to keep him safe. ⁴

Over the years, Fat Joe has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in physical assault lawsuits over decades of beating rappers and civilians; some rumors would have been disproportionate (Papoose), some urban legends (Masta Ace), some corroborated (Cuban Link). ⁵

On the day of the New York City blackout in 2003, Joe and Jay-Z were supposed to settle their dispute as opposing coaches in a streetball game at Rucker Park, featuring members of the hoops elite like LeBron James, Allen Iverson and Yao Ming to all of them. side. ⁶

50 Cent was so pissed off by Joe’s guest feature on Ja Rule’s “New York” that an antics-riddled, sketch-filled feud on YouTube hadn’t been seen since the heyday of In living color to the crude rants on the VMA stage, ignited. ⁷

The myths, the legends, the unbelievable somehow made it credible: this is Fat Joe, but not the Fat Joe I grew up with as a kid in New York in the 2000s. In my eyes, he was a cartoonish, balding rap villain, always sporting flashy leathers, Yankee cuts and a huge chain to represent Terror Squad, his mainly Bronx-based clique. He was the flag-waving Puerto Rican radio giant with rap-R&B hybrid powerhouses in Jennifer Lopez, Thalia and, most famously, Ashanti. He was the guy who made silly appearances in Horror movie 3 And Happy feetas an animated penguin named Seymour. He was one of the great villains of video games Dej Jam: Fight for New York. He produced smash hits that poured out of the speakers at Knicks games, like “New York,” “We Takin’ Over” and “Lean Back,” an all-hands melee with Remy Ma softened by a swing dance of shoulders that came through so hard that even my rap-hating grandmother proudly hit that shit.