Jay-Z has penned more mercurial lines than most rappers could ever dream of creating, and there’s one line in particular that resonates with Fat Joe that he described as the “hardest lyric” of all time.
Joe previously had an unwanted run-in with ‘Hov’, and the two of them feuded for several years, but their bad blood is now a relic of the past. Remarkably, their feud didn’t start as a rap beef, but it was a basketball match, of all things, that made their relationship turn sour.
Every year, Joe would participate in Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC) tournament at the Holocombe Rucker Park in Harlem, New York, and his team was an unstoppable force.
However, in 2003, Jay decided to flex his financial muscles and recruit an all-star team that included LeBron James to take the crown from Fat Joe’s Terror Squad. As it turned out, a blackout in New York would postpone the game, and Hov wouldn’t show up for the rematch.
In response, Joe rapped, “My n***as didn’t have to play to win the championship” in ‘Lean Back’, and their petty Basketball beef eventually cooled down.
“He’s a great guy. You know, we text each other on Christmas [and] New Years,” he later said about ‘Hov’. “We tell each other how beautiful it is to have such a close relationship and a beautiful relationship and I wished we were friends sooner. It’s been a beautiful experience.”
His favourite track by his former enemy is ‘Feelin’ It’, which appeared on his imperial debut, Reasonable Doubt. During an appearance on the I Am Athlete podcast, he singled out the line, “If every n***a in your clique is rich, your clique is rugged, Nobody will fall ’cause everyone will be each others crutches,” and hailed it as “the hardest lyric in hip-hop.”
Elaborating on why he connected so profoundly with that specific rhyme, Joe added, “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.”
It says a lot about Joe’s ethos that this is his favourite hip-hop lyric, and it expresses a level of unselfishness that we can all get behind. He’s a team player who fails to see the point in rising to the top if you’re not sharing the success with those you cherish.
