Fat Joe has opened up about his past beef with 50 Cent and the ways in which it boosted his image in Hip Hop.
On Tuesday (July 25), Fat Joe sat down with Cam Capone News to discuss his back-and-forth with the G-Unit mogul, revealing that he has no ill feelings toward the “Many Men” rapper in hindsight. Contrarily, he said it influenced the way people looked at him to his advantage.
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“Although I worked for everything I got, although I never extorted nobody, although I didn’t bully nobody,” the 52 year old said, “I had the persona of New York Suge Knight. Like, y’know, people feared Fat Joe and the Terror Squad in that way, y’know? So for [50 Cent] talking about Fat Joe in the same city … the funeral homes was making bids.”
Check out Joe’s comments, and him recalling “two of the most dangerous crews” going at each other back in the day, below:
Earlier this year, 50 Cent also reflected on the feud, which began with him and fellow Queens rapper Ja Rule having problems with one another. The two became embroiled in one of Hip Hop’s fiercest rivalries of the late ’90s and early ’00s when they traded blows both on wax and in real life, stemming from a 1999 incident where Ja was allegedly robbed of his chain at gunpoint by an associate of 50.
50 became so consumed with dismantling Ja Rule that he even went after those who worked with him — something Fat Joe learned after teaming up with the Murder Inc. hitmaker on 2002’s “What’s Luv?” and 2004’s “New York” alongside Jadakiss.
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After sparring lyrically on “Piggy Bank” and “My FoFo,” tensions between the G-Unit and Terror Squad leaders spilled over at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, where they exchanged disses onstage and their respective crews almost came to blows backstage.
Reflecting on the beef almost 20 years later, 50 Cent feels that he was “buggin’” for going to war with Fat Joe and anyone else who aligned themselves with Ja Rule.
“There’s an element, a part of our culture that I’m aware of it because I am it,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “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.’”
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50 went on to praise Joey Crack for his loyalty to Ja Rule and Murder Inc., describing him as the type of friend everybody needs in their corner.
“Fat Joe, his issues, I would see him a little uncomfortable with the success I was having, and I interpreted as, ‘He doesn’t like me,’ when he’s really the kind of guy you want to be friends with because he’s loyal to a default,” he added. “He’s so loyal for one record that [Murder Inc.] did with him that we became enemies.”
