Fat Joe stopped by the I Am Athlete podcast this week to talk shop with hosts Brandon Marshall, Chad Ochocinco Johnson, LeSean McCoy, and D.J. Williams.
While discussing how having a support system is crucial for achieving your goals, the Terror Squad legend hammered the point home by referencing a line from Jay-Z’s 1996 song “Feelin’ It” (If every n***a in your clique is rich, your clique is rugged/Nobody will fall ‘cause everyone will be each others crutches), calling it “the hardest lyric in hip-hop.”
Fat Joe elaborated on the line at the 53:25 mark of the episode: “Everybody wanna be the man. Everybody wanna be the guy everybody looks up to. There’s no real strength in that,” he explained. “The strength is in everybody eating, so that if one of us falls, we can lift him up. You have to understand that mentality.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the Bronx rapper touched on his past beef with Hov, explaining that the bad blood stemmed from their respective teams going head-to-head in basketball games at Rucker Park.
“You know what happens man. You know there’s a little bit of jealousy involved,” Joe recalled at the 1-hour, 20-minute mark. “You know what I’m saying. The man was always winning. I might have been a little jealous if I’m gonna be a man about it. You know what i’m saying? He won at everything. He had the baddest chick in the world.”
He continued, “He [Jay-Z] was just winning. And so, what Joe had carved out was this: So I always had the streets, no matter who I had beef with. And so The Rucker is part of the streets. That was the streets in the summertime, and out of nowhere here comes this guy after I win five ‘chips in a row, he wants a team!”
Fat Joe also took time to give Kanye West his flowers, praising the Chicago artist as his “favorite rapper in the world.”
“Kanye is my favorite rapper in the world, and I love him to death,” he said. “He’s my favorite rapper, he’s been my favorite rapper. And I won’t turn my back on him, no matter what he do.”
Joe added, “He’s a genius, he’s incredible, and I fuck with him. A lotta people we cool with, they don’t vote like us, they don’t agree with everything, but we gotta fuck with him. He made ‘Jesus Walks’.”
The conversation also turned to Antonio Brown, who was recently released by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after he walked off the field in dramatic fashion in the team’s Week 18 game against the Jets. While debating if the All-Pro wide receiver’s NFL days are behind him, Joey Crack delivered an unexpected endorsement regarding AB pivoting into the music industry.
“I’m going to tell you some crazy,” he began. “I went to a doctor’s appointment this morning he was playing AB’s new song, that’s crazy. Not the bullshit dude, my doctor, Gene Nathan, a Jewish doctor, said, ‘Yeah you heard the new AB,’ and he started playing the song. Yo he [AB] might be right.”
Check out the full episodee up top via YouTube.
