Fat Joe has admitted that he doesn’t quite understand a lot of today’s Hip Hop music.
In a conversation with Complex, the “Lean Back” hitmaker shared that the rap from younger artists often leaves him feeling “confused.”
“I love and support the youth, [but] I’ve been stuck in traffic listening to it — I felt like they were playing devil music right next to me,” he explained. “I was thinking, ‘Yo, what the hell? Is that Hip Hop?!’ They’ve got some strange stuff happening.”
Joe continued: “I mess with them, I’ll always give them props. But I don’t know how they ended up with this specific sound. Hip Hop is so diverse — we’ve got Lauryn Hill, Biz Markie, Eric B. and Rakim, Nas… You won’t ever open this stuff up and hear the same thing.”
The Bronx native went on to express his concerns about the rap coming from his hometown: “Sometimes when I’m listening, especially to the younger artists in New York, it feels like I’m hearing the same beats, the same thing over and over, and I get numb. I’m like, ‘Yo, this is wild.’
“[Back in the day], when we had a love song, it was LL [Cool J] singing, ‘I need love / Sometimes I stare at the room, I hear my conscience call.’ [Now], if you hear a love song, it’s over the same beat and the lyrics are like, ‘I’ll kill you! Fuck your mother!’ It’s the same stuff. I’m confused.”
Fat Joe also firmly dismissed the idea of making a “sexy drill” song — a smoother, more sensual variation of the NYC subgenre made popular by artists like Cash Cobain and Ice Spice.
“That’s definitely not happening,” he said, holding his head in his hands. “I’ve got a love song with Babyface.”
Fat Joe is confused by current rap music pic.twitter.com/e2XEr7isk6
— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) January 20, 2025
Fat Joe isn’t the only veteran rapper puzzled by recent trends in the genre.
Last year, LL Cool J was asked in an interview with The New York Times what he thought was missing in today’s Hip Hop, and he simply replied: “Songwriting.”
He explained: “There’s nothing wrong with rapping about money and success, or rapping about pure sex — I love both. [But] for me, there needs to be more to it for a project to really grab me.”
Dr. Dre echoed a similar sentiment in 2023 on Kevin Hart’s Peacock series Hart to Hart, saying: “Anybody talking negatively about the state of Hip Hop right now sounds like someone’s grandfather. This is just what it is. Hip Hop is evolving. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it.”
However, he also added: “I’m being honest with you. Some of this stuff, most of this stuff, I don’t like. I don’t listen to a lot of it. But I’m not hating on it. I’ll never hate on it.”
