Fat Joe was a recent guest on the I Am Athlete Podcast with with hosts Brandon Marshall, Chad Ochocinco Johnson, LeSean McCoy, and D.J. Williams.
During his visit he offered commentary on a slew of topics and name dropped what he considers the hardest rap lyric ever. While touching on the importance of a good support system, the Terror Squad rapper referenced a line from Jay-Z’s 1996 song “Feeling It.”
“The hardest lyric in Hip Hop is on JAY-Z’s first album when he said, ‘Something something and we will be each other’s crutches.”
On the Reasonable Doubt cut referenced by Joe, Hov raps “If every n-gga in your clique is rich, then your clique is rugged / Nobody will fall ‘cause everyone will be each other’s crutches.”
Fat Joe says he considers that line one of the hardest in hip hop because it talks about the importance of elevating your clique.
“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.”
“Whether your friend is a barber, we want him to be the best barber in the world. Your friend’s a mechanic? Best mechanic in the world. Your friend is in acquisitions and mergers? We want him to be the best. We need to be the best so that when we need each other, somebody’s there for us. We all there to cover all aspects.
“That’s the true power, the people power. There’s nothing more powerful than people power!”
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 tournament 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!”
You can watch the entire episode below.
