One day, when Tupac was locked up at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, Joe went on the radio and made a crack about the incarcerated rap star. Apparently, the Puerto Ricans affiliated with Joe in the same jail mistook that for beef and began to harass Pac to defend Joe’s honor. So Pac, from behind bars, made a pleading call to Joe as a way to get the heat off him. ¹

Another time, in L.A., Fat Joe was hanging with the Westside Connection’s Mack 10 for a Sprite commercial shoot. Common, who had previously been involved in a historically acidic beef with Ice Cube and the Westside Connection until Louis Farrakhan eased the tensions, was there and got into an altercation with the crew. Supposedly, things were on the brink of violently escalating until Fat Joe, a.k.a. Joey Crack, stepped in and saved Common’s life. ²

Speed round time. Fat Joe not only booked Biggie for his first show ever—at The Fever in the Bronx—but also recorded an unreleased joint album with Big before his death full of no-holds-barred Tupac diss records. ³

When NBA wing Stephen Jackson was a rookie, Fat Joe secretly had two Puerto Rican heavies follow him around New York to ensure his safety. ⁴

Over the years Fat Joe paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in physical assault lawsuits for decades of thrashing rappers and civilians; some rumored to be blown out of proportion (Papoose), some urban legend (Masta Ace), some corroborated (Cuban Link). ⁵

On the day of the NYC blackout of 2003, Joe and Jay-Z were supposed to settle their heated beef as opposing coaches at a Rucker Park streetball game, with members of the hoops elite like LeBron James, Allen Iverson, and Yao Ming on each side. ⁶

50 Cent was so pissed off by Joe’s guest feature on Ja Rule’s “New York” that an antics-riddled feud full of YouTube skit work not seen since the heyday of In Living Color to foul-mouthed rants on the stage of the VMAs, ignited. ⁷

The myths, the legends, the unbelievable made sort of believable: this is Fat Joe, though not the Fat Joe I grew up with as a kid in ’00s New York. In my eyes, he was a bald-headed cartoonish rap villain, always sporting flashy leathers, Yankee fitteds, and a massive chain to represent Terror Squad, his mostly Bronx-based clique. He was the Puerto Rican flag-waving radio giant with inescapable player rap-R&B hybrid joints with Jennifer Lopez, Thalia, and most famously, Ashanti. He was the dude who made silly appearances in Scary Movie 3 and Happy Feet, as an animated penguin named Seymour. He was one of the big bads of the video game Dej Jam: Fight for New York. He churned out smash hits that blasted out of the loudspeakers at Knicks games, like “New York,” “We Takin’ Over,” and “Lean Back,” a bare-knuckled scrum with Remy Ma softened by a shoulder-swaying dance that crossed over so hard that even my rap-hating grandmother hit that shit proudly.

This is the yin and yang of Fat Joe, a beloved side-quest of New York hip-hop who has been punching above his weight on the mic for decades. Credit to a charisma that channels the spirit of one of those ’roided out professional wrestling stars of the ’80s with life-changing promos and above-average in-ring work. Have you ever heard someone throw Joe in their top five? Probably not. I’m not even sure those on his payroll do. But he is one of the most recognizable faces and voices in New York hip-hop history, repeatedly big-upped for his preternatural ability to be in the right rooms at the right time and reinvent himself at will. After more than three decades as a seen-it-all bridge between distant hip-hop eras, who was once upon a time a certified underground rap menace, he’s still standing. There’s even a 1995 album to his name that holds its own in the mid-’90s wave of drug dealer epics through wrecking-ball rhymes and an infatuation with the golden age of hip-hop, called Jealous One’s Envy.

Stylized as J.O.E., simply because Crack wanted an excuse to turn his name into an acronym like his idols LL Cool J (Ladies Love Cool James) and KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everybody), his second album, a follow-up to his raw 1993 debut, is the audio version of a subway brawl. His slab-of-concrete voice, compared blasphemously in a 1995 Rolling Stone review to Biggie, brings a theatricality to his tough-minded goon music. Vignettes of being a loot-hungry, neighborhood terror are deepened by their autobiographical lens. “Here comes the nigga from the East/Who just been crowned for most hated by police,” he erupts on “Fat Joe’s in Town,” creating a visual of him storming through the five boroughs like Omar Little did Baltimore.

The goal throughout the album is to get bread by any means necessary. Joe bluntly describes memories of hustling on the Bronx’s Trinity Åvenue and the violence that was everywhere (“Fuck around and get thrown off the project roof”; “A Puerto Rican villain who be dealin’ and illin’ for nothin’”). His Jeep door hard and no-nonsense bragging feels so much like the early days of Atlanta trap and Chicago drill, especially in how Joe makes his borough feel like it has invisible barriers, like a deal in Queensbridge or Red Hook might as well take place on the moon. And how his storytelling relies so much on his real-life cred as a hood boogeyman. Longtime journalist and podcaster Elliott Wilson spent the first paragraph of his 2022 GQ profile of Fat Joe recalling how shook he was of the rapper in the early ’90s; once, in a late-2000s MTV News clip, a trembling Papoose called Fat Joe a “bully”; G-Unit’s Tony Yayo said on Drink Champs there was nothing worse than beefing with Fat Joe. Even without any of that context, Joe relentlessly builds himself up as a tough guy, eternally ready to crack heads like a toothless hockey enforcer.

Back then, Joseph Cartagena was a Puerto Rican-Cuban kid in the Forest Houses of the South Bronx, an area about 20 blocks away from Yankee Stadium that was decimated by the loss of jobs and housing, the usual aftershock of white flight. He came of age in the ’80s when hip-hop culture was rippling through the borough like wildfire. According to Joe, in his youth, he can remember catching KRS-One debut “The Bridge is Over” in a BX park, and he heard of his older brother’s work as a crate boy for Grandmaster Flash. Early on he could see Puerto Rican hip-hop pioneers in the flesh: Dazzled by the flyness of Tito of the Fearless Four and in awe of Ruby Dee of the Fantastic Five’s all-out softball games with his brothers. “Well Ruby Dee is my name and I’m Puerto Rican/You might think I’m Black the way I’m speakin’,” goes Ruby in one scene from 1983’s Wild Style, a graffiti-writing classic.

Joe was a graffiti writer himself, getting kicked out of multiple intermediate schools for tagging his moniker “Crack!” on the walls. Contrary to the popular rumor that it came from selling crack, it was actually about a different crack, as he wrote in his 2022 memoir: “I was chubby, my pants would sag under my stomach and the crack of my ass was always showing.” In fact, Terror Squad started out as a graffiti crew Joey was a part of, morphing into a criminal enterprise for local stick-up kids and dealers to rep. By 14, he was robbing kids (he loves to tell a story about the time he cleaned out his entire high school gym class) and moving drugs underneath his older brother Angel, who, Joe claims, owned 47 luxury cars until addiction and jail got in the way.

Occasionally Joe went bombing with his friend Joseph Kirkland from the same projects. The other Joe’s tag was “ZRock,” and he later went by Diamond D. In the late ’80s, Diamond was the producer-half of a rap duo known as Ultimate Force; they recorded a debut album that featured Joe on a couple of tracks. Eventually, Diamond broke through behind the boards—alongside storied beat-makers DJ Premier and Showbiz—on Funky Technician, the 1990 punchline-heavy debut from Lord Finesse and DJ Mike Smooth. Finesse and Showbiz grew up in the Forest Houses, too, and their success pushed Joe to link back up with Diamond where he did a bunch of ridiculously hostile ad-libbing on Diamond’s sample-crazy 1992 rap classic Stunts, Blunts & Hip Hop. Some time around that release was the formation of the tight-knit underground collective D.I.T.C, which stood for Diggin’ In the Crates, and housed Joe, Diamond, Finesse, Showbiz & A.G., O.C., Buckwild, and the late Big L.

Joe’s charismatic blustering caught on fast, even before ever officially dropping a song. He won Amateur Night at the Apollo in Harlem four weeks in a row, got recruited by influential DJ Kool Red Alert to do a radio jingle, and co-hosted a few episodes of Video Music Box, the cherished television series that documented the growth of hip-hop in real time. His breakout single was also his first as a solo rapper, 1993’s “Flow Joe”—released as Fat Joe Da Gangsta on top of a funky beat by Diamond D. On the track, Joe’s street-tough lyrics are basic but he sounds like a human tsunami. The music video is the real highlight; shot in Greenpoint, Joe and his chest-beating crew act as if they’ve taken over an abandoned factory like the greedy crooks in Walter Hill’s Trespass. Months after “Flow Joe,” East Coast rap underwent a rapid transformation. Out came 36 Chambers and Ready To Die, and one day, Showbiz pulled up on Joe with an advance copy of Illmatic.

You can feel that tirelessly canonized trifecta looming over Jealous One’s Envy. It’s in the rhyme schemes that long to be as layered as Nas’: “I be the top dolla scala, rockin’ gold collars/While you tryin’ to sip the juice, I’m takin’ swallows/Step into the zone and get blown my ways are internationally known,” he barks on “Success,” which is strong despite those G-league bars, specifically the breezy DJ Premier remix. It’s in “Envy,” which flips “Sexual Healing” into a phony “Juicy.” It’s definitely in the Raekwon-assisted “Respect Mine,” complete with a gloomy, string-heavy knockoff RZA beat and tryhard macabre vibes: “Sodomize your daughter and make a widow out your wife,” raps Joe, having a bit of an identity crisis.

Crack is more compelling when he’s himself, an unfiltered Bronx roughhouser; a New York hip-hop obsessed moment maker; a heavyset showman like one of his heroes Heavy D. That can all be found in the album’s intro, a razor-sharp back and forth with KRS-One. By this time Joe had been bombing with his rap lodestar for a few years, and on “Bronx Tale,” underlined by Diamond’s mean bassline, their chemistry is so organic, as Joe’s powerful warning shots bounce off KRS’s acrobatic flow like they’re freestyling on Stretch and Bobbito. Later, on “Part Deux,” while repurposing the hook of “Flow Joe,” Joe brings the mafioso ruckus, living his rich ass fantasies: “Spilled your chips in the casino while feastin’ on shrimp scalappino.”

When Fat Joe is in the zone, he sounds like a bucking bull at the rodeo. For one, the hard-nosed, lyrical rush of “Say Word”: “In cahoots with the San Juan authorities/Hated by majorities, loved by minorities.” Next, setting the future DJ Khaled template on “Watch Out,” acting as the loudmouthed hype man for a brooding Terror Squad posse cut. “Watch Out” is notable as the debut of Big Pun, the Nuyorican wordplay extraordinaire, who Fat Joe discovered freestyling outside a corner store in the Bronx and mentored until his death in 2000, at 28. Immediately Pun has the training wheels off, “Yo, I ’cause a bloody bath to make my buddies laugh and gig’,” spitting a borderline horrorcore verse like he was prone to do. The song ventures too far down that path, though, when Keith Nut pulls up later with child molestation threats. I wonder if anyone was like Are you sure about that one Keith?

Scaling back slightly on the edginess, “This Shit is Real (DJ Premier Remix),” is J.O.E.’s holy grail. Premo bugs out on the scratches, and Joe’s lyrics are the perfect marriage of street realism and embellished sketches. “I’m sick and tired of being the bummiest nigga out the crew/I gotta get mine, I gotta get cash,” he raps, the desperation made as clear as any song on Mobb Deep’s nihilistic masterpiece The Infamous, from the same year, with the following lines: “I see a old man, I’m gonna rob him with the quick-fast/Gimme your motherfucking loot, papi.” At the same time, Joe drops in one-bar visuals that are as hilarious as they are bleak, “One day I went to visit my Aunt and stuck up my cuz.” It cracks me up every time, while also making the pitch-black, dog-eat-dog ecosystem of the South Bronx underworld evocative. Funny enough, more than a decade later, on an episode of Juan Epstein while promoting his return to the pits with 2010’s The Darkside Vol.1, a snickering Joe admitted that the story told in that bar is “partially true.” He only beat up his cousin for ripping off another cousin. So actually, he’s the hero.

Threaded into Joe’s seedy Bronx memories are movie clips there to create a cinematic atmosphere, from King of New York, The Warriors, and a Spanish-language skit influenced by The Godfather. Cliché, I know. But three years later, on Joe’s third album Don Cartagena, he nailed that idea by fleshing out his Puerto Rican gangster persona and recruiting a deep guest list of rappers to create a Coppola-worthy ensemble of his own. In the process, Don Cartagena is the start of what Joey became: flashy hitmaker, professional mythmaker, a taste-forward New York rap nucleus who N.O.R.E referred to, hyperbolically, as the “The Puerto Rican Puff Daddy.”

Gradually, Fat Joe switched out all the mean mugging for a daytime television smile. Six years after Jealous One’s Envy was the sequel, Jealous One’s Still Envy (J.O.S.E.), a decent album that went platinum and spawned multiple radio hits. Ten years later, Joe was on the stage at MTV VMA’s calling 50 Cent and G-Unit the police. Two decades later, Joe returned to the spotlight with “All the Way Up,” another one of those New York anthems that will be heard at sporting events forever. In recent years, turn on the TV and you might catch Crack guest hosting the Wendy Williams Show or giggling on Drew Barrymore or rubbing shoulders with janky politicians. A frequent guest on the rap and lifestyle podcast circuit, he’s a brand-friendly businessman more than anything else.

His longevity is on par with the Snoops and Jays of the world, absorbed into everyday mainstream life. Almost 30 years ago he was in Ego Trip threatening to choke out Masta Ace now he’s the amiable host of a Starz interview series creatively called Fat Joe Talks. Surreal, but somehow, it feels right. Nowadays, pop culture is hip-hop culture; a lot of the time for the worst. If that’s the case at least Fat Joe gets to be one of the public faces carrying on the stories and folk tales, because there is one thing about him that doesn’t require any fact checks: Fat Joe is hip-hop.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan