Key Takeaways
- Fat Joe says his verse on Ja Rule’s 2004 track “New York” never targeted 50 Cent: “The answer was no.”
- Joe said he had no issue with 50 Cent at the time and even passed on Scott Storch’s beat for “Candy Shop,” while stressing that Ja Rule was his friend.
- The feature still sparked a seven-year feud after 50 Cent dissed Joe on “Piggy Bank,” though Fif later admitted he was “buggin’” for dragging him into the Ja Rule conflict.
Fat Joe is pushing back on more than two decades of assumptions about his guest spot on Ja Rule's "New York," saying his verse was never pointed at 50 Cent.
The denial came during Monday’s episode of The Real Report, where Joe sat across from Tony Yayo and Uncle Murda and talked about the 2004 track, which was released at the height of Ja Rule and 50 Cent’s feud.
“Somebody was trying to ask me [if I was] dissing 50 Cent in ‘New York.’ The answer was no,” Joe said near the one-hour and 10-minute mark in the video linked below. “I made [50 Cent’s 2005 hit single] ‘Candy Shop’ with [producer] Scott Storch. Lil’ Kim [who was dating Storch at the time], she’ll tell you.”
Joe recalled Storch calling him anywhere between 20 and 30 times asking him if he wanted the beat for what eventually became 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.” At the time, Joe declined the beat and insisted to Storch that he “ain't got no problem with 50 Cent.”
“I wouldn't have dissed him,” Joe added. “His beef was with Ja Rule. Ja Rule is my friend, he saved my life.”
Joe then lamented that “New York,” which was also originally offered to him by Cool & Dre, ignited a seven-year long feud with Fif.
On the 2005 song "Piggy Bank," Fifty took aim at both Joe and Jadakiss for appearing on the record, rapping, "That fat n***a thought ‘Lean Back’ was ‘In da Club’ / My shit sold 11 mill’, his shit was a dud."
Years later, Fifty conceded to Rolling Stone he was "buggin’" for pulling Joe in at all.
"It was like my issues, 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,” he said at the time. “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’.’”
He continued, “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’s so loyal for one record that [Murder Inc.] did with him [“What’s Luv’’] that we became enemies.”
