Fat Joe has recalled a time when he and Big Pun walked out of the Grammys after losing out on silverware.
In an interview with XXL, Joey Crack reflected on that eventful night in 1999 when his late friend and collaborator became fed up with the Recording Academy.
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Pun’s debut album Capital Punishment was up for Best Rap Album that year, but lost to JAY-Z’s Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life. The award was presented before the televised broadcast began.
The loss didn’t sit well with Pun, who decided he wanted to leave the ceremony before it even finished. Fat Joe wasn’t keen to take off as he was rubbing shoulders with some of his favorite artists, but ultimately he remained loyal to his partner-in-rhyme.
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“Big Pun was nominated for two Grammys. He went and got the finger waves like Dru Down. It’s that iconic picture where we look like the kingpin. The big-ass suits,” Joe said. “I remember when we went to the Grammys, they had told us that they do the Hip Hop awards before, and we lost. Ricky Martin was doing the ‘Living La Vida Loca’ and I’m looking around. It’s Aretha Franklin. It’s Kirk Franklin. I waited my whole life to get there.
“Pun was like, ‘Yo, fuck these people, man. They jerked us.’ I was like, ‘What?’ and he was like ‘Let’s go.’ I was like, ‘Yo, Pun, are you serious?’ He was like, ‘Yo, let’s go. Fuck that, you my brother, let’s go.’ I was like, ‘Aight, fuck it. We gotta go.’ That was a big moment for us. We left. We left the Grammys. And we were strapped, like the cover, at the Grammys.”
1999 was the same year that JAY-Z boycotted the Grammys, beginning his contentious relationship with the Recording Academy. Hov skipped the ceremony in solidarity with DMX, who didn’t earn a single nomination despite dropping two of the biggest rap albums the year before: It’s Dark and Hell is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood.
Despite his Grammys loss, Fat Joe went on to explain how Big Pun was a force to be reckoned with and opened the door for a lot of artists before his death.
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“I put him on the second album, and then we just focused on Pun, just making him a rap superstar,” he said. “And Pun became the first Latino solo artist to sell two million records. Frenzy. Latinos never saw nothing like that. One of the greatest lyricists that ever lived in life.”
He continued: “We dropped ‘Still Not a Playa’ and played it on the radio in the morning show on Hot 97. By the time I made it to the lobby, Lyor Cohen, Craig Kallman, Steve Rifkind, every executive you name in the world was waiting for me at the lobby like, ‘Yo, you got any other Spanish cousins? I wanna sign them now.’ That was my moment of becoming rich at that point, you know?”
Sadly, Big Pun’s career was cut short as he suffered a heart attack and respiratory failure on February 5, 2000; he didn’t recover and passed away two days later. His second album Yeeeah Baby was released posthumously in 2001 and debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Losing a Grammy to JAY-Z wasn’t Pun’s only connection to the Brooklyn billionaire. According to Roc-A-Fella’s former Head of A&R Kyambo “Hip Hop” Joshua, JAY-Z had the beat for “Still Not A Player” first.
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“There’s a lot that didn’t make it, that I tried to force and then other people used them,” Hip Hop told the R.O.A.D. Podcast earlier this year. “‘Still Not A Player, I had that. I had [Black Rob’s] ‘Woah,’ I think [Memphis] Bleek passed on that. We had [Mr. Cheeks’] ‘Lights, Camera, Action,’ [JAY] said it was too slow. I was like, ‘What you mean it’s too slow?’”
Released in 1998, “Still Not A Player” featuring Joe was technically a remix of Big Pun’s 1997 single “I’m Not A Player,” but ended up surpassing the success of the original in many ways and became Pun’s highest-charting song on the Billboard Hot 100.
