NEW YORK — Fat Joe lost the weight, but he’s still hard to miss. Especially in this city, especially with a watch with a bezel so iced out that it would freeze any eye that lands upon it. As he enters the elevator to head to an interview, a man he clearly doesn’t know meets him and tells him that they met some years ago, and he has a cousin who works with Jadakiss, and he’s been a fan for a long time, and he’s looking forward to the new album.
That new album, Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s collaborative Plata o Plomo, released Friday, doesn’t feature Jadakiss. It almost couldn’t. Joe’s worked with Jada many times in the past, yes, but this album isn’t that. This album is All the Way Up featuring French Montana and Money Showers featuring Ty Dolla Sign. It’s 2017 rap by a 1990s head, not the throwback-to-the-old-days stylings that the LOX reunion album of last year was heavy on.
“It don’t sound dated; you can’t,” Fat Joe tells For The Win. “It’s been a beautiful blessing throughout Fat Joe’s career for him to always readjust and reinvent himself and be able to move with the time. This is technically the hardest time to ever do it because I come from an era when it was about beats and rhymes, different tempos. And now these young people, they doing some things out there. So I had to marry the two. And actually I believe this album is going to create a blueprint where all East Coast artists are going to figure out how to do it because we definitely got it together.”
Bold proclamations are nothing new or unusual for Joe. They can’t be. This is a man whose debut album, Represent, is now 24 years old. He’s boosted the prominence of Latino rappers and found himself in feuds with 50 Cent, Jay Z and some of his own Terror Squad group members — including Remy Ma. Fat Joe doesn’t back down from any challenge or waiver on any claim.
That’s what drives him to call Plata o Plomo the biggest album since Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. He even went so far as to compare his chemistry with Remy to Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, West and Jay Z and even … Fat Joe and Big Pun.
“She’s the hottest female in the game on real time,” he says. “What she brings to me, I can’t get it myself. It’s a different kind of nucleus, a different kind of energy that I only got with Big Pun. So she’s equal to that. The same vibe we get in the studio, the same professionalism, the same wittiness. Everything you can name. Remy’s a big deal, bro. Fat Joe, she makes me so much better having her with me.”
There’s no denying Remy’s power on the album. Her swagger and fluid rhyming propel several tracks. But “Joey Crack” dominates proceedings with his powerhouse flow. Asked which basketball player emulated his rap style, Joe picked Orlando Magic-era Shaquille O’Neal. But here, he comes across like Miami Heat-era Shaq: still a powerful force but more economical. One such standout comes on Warning featuring Kat Dahlia.
WARNING: All embedded songs in this article feature lyrics not suitable for all ages and workplaces.
Warning is a display of the difference between Plata o Plomo and past Fat Joe albums. Here, as he says, “even the street tracks are like Lean Back.”
That might cause some cognitive dissonance for those who think of Fat Joe in the context of Twins (Deep Cover) or John Blaze, one of the greatest posse cuts in rap history. Those tracks and others are towering examples of hard-core East Coast lyricism from the late-1990s. It’s what comes naturally to Fat Joe, and the punchlines and raw verbiage slips through the cracks even on new-age club bangers like Money Showers: “Got her staring at the pole like election day.”
The dichotomy is something Joe admits to struggling with.
“I don’t believe that it should hamper me, it should hamper the creative process in being new,” he says. “But subliminally, mentally, it bothers me because I know I have a certain audience that watches me. So it hinders me because I can’t just go left. So the record that we have with The-Dream, it’s a straight smash hit that’s gonna go pop. The Diggin’ in the Crates fans, they’re not into that like that. But when I listen to the record, it’s like, it’s a beautiful body of work. It’s a smash record. Why won’t I let that go?”
But who is Fat Joe? That’s one of the questions that pops up with even a glance at his career. He started as Fat Joe da Gangsta with DITC, the collective that could have competed with Wu-Tang Clan on a talent basis, had it been better organized and marketed. He brought Big Pun to the masses. He accused 50 Cent of being a snitch and fake thug.
But he’s also the guy who worked with Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin, whose biggest solo hit was “What’s Luv?” with Ashanti, who has been a rap radio favorite for 20 years. That’s why the aforementioned track with The-Dream, Heartbreak, can essentially be a tropical house love song, and only his oldest fans will bat a lash.
It’s a good song. It’s a good album, the type that will feel very comfortable on Spotify shuffles with Drake and Future and Bryson Tiller, whose career Joe brags he helped launched.
But what about on a Fat Joe career discography shuffle? Where’s the new John Blaze?
“John Blaze is easy (to make),” Joe says. “That’s a back pocket. You know, we did, for all the underground heads, we did an album, DITC Studios. I ain’t even gon’ lie, my brother O.C., who’s been a member of Diggin’ in the Crates for like 25 years, he’s like, ‘Yo, can you still do this?’ I said, ‘My man, I do this in my sleep. This where I do real hip hop.’ And the album came out great. I’d rather do a John Blaze than do a — like, you know, that’s me in my pocket.”
The conflict is in the pause. Maybe Fat Joe really wants to make DITC tracks with O.C. and Diamond D. Maybe he wishes his entire career could have been street bangers with Jadakiss. But he’s doing what he needs to. To stay relevant. To survive.
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