Fat Joe has spoken about the time he unintentionally beat up a key player at Hot 97, and how the mistake almost cost him his career.
In an interview with Hot 97’s DJ Enuff for his GOAT Talk series, the Terror Squad rapper reflected back on a time early on in his career when the popular New York radio station threw a sold-out show at Lehman High School in his native Bronx.
A “young” and “cocky” Fat Joe — who at that point was one of the Big Apple’s hottest new rappers — said he rolled through the party with 100 people, and immediately was turned away from the door.
“I’m like, ‘What do you mean? They came to see Fat Joe!’ Because they did come to see Fat Joe,” he recalled. “So I beat the guy up, and the guy turned out to be one of the bosses of Hot 97.”
The altercation led to Fat Joe’s music being pulled from Hot 97 airwaves, hurting the commercial reach of his records. That, however, only made him determined to rectify the situation and mend fences.
“He stopped playing my records. So my whole second album, almost third album, they wouldn’t play my records,” he continued. “So I kept coming back, begging him and kissing his ass and they’d be like, ‘Nah, I’m not ready to squash it with you.’ I used to have people tell him, ‘Yo, Joe is a good guy, he was young, he didn’t know.’”
Joe went on to say that he bought Hot 97’s then-program director Tracy Cloherty a massive teddy bear as an apology gift, which is now forever displayed in the station’s office.
“That was part of bribing her to convince this other guy — I don’t want to say his name — to finally forgive me,” he added. “Years later, he finally forgave me and was like, ‘Yo, Fat Joe it’s all good.’
“I was like, ‘I was young, I was stupid. I ain’t no better.’ So we squashed the beef.”
Fat Joe has had his share of feuds over the years, with his most notable being with 50 Cent in the mid 2000s.
50’s issues with the Terror Squad leader stemmed from his relationship with his fierce rival Ja Rule, who he worked with on 2002’s “What’s Luv?” and 2004’s “New York.”
Things between the pair came to a head at the 2005 MTV VMAs, where they traded vicious shots onstage and their respective crews almost came to blows backstage.
As he revealed years later in his Book of Jose memoir, the public spat cost Joe a lucrative $20 million deal with Air Jordan.
“Me and Michael Jordan are actual friends. I met with him six times going over designs for the Fat Joe Jordan,” he said. “Some of those meetings were literally just me and him, brainstorming, bouncing ideas off each other. But after the VMAs, Mike deaded the deal.”
He added: “‘You know I love you, Big Joe, but you’re too hot right now,’ he told me on a phone call. ‘I wanted to do it, but I’m not into all that rap beef. With all this controversy, we can’t do the sneaker anymore.’ That was it. I lost about $20 million by not getting that deal.”
50 Cent also expressed regret for dragging Fat Joe into his feud with Ja Rule, admitting in an interview with Rolling Stone that he was “buggin.’”
“There’s an element, a part of our culture that I’m aware of it because I am it,” he told the outlet earlier this year. “Your Lil Durks, your NBA YoungBoys, the whole surrounding cast of that … it almost splits our culture in half because when you cool with one, you can’t work with the other.
“I was using the same thinking in the very beginning of my career because it’s just the thinking you would use in the environment. If anybody went next to Ja Rule, I’d jump on the person who featured with them, anybody who was faintly near them, ’cause I put him on life support and you wanna go resuscitate him.
“So that energy, later you look at it and you go, ‘I was buggin.’”
