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Fat Joe’s Terror Squad was, for an extremely short time, one of the best crews in New York, but, as a collective they didn’t last a long time. Still, the group made some big hits during the early-2000s, with their most loved being ‘Lean Back’.

Produced by legendary beatmker Scott Storch, ‘Lean Back’ was a smash hit in 2004 and has been a club anthem ever since. A dark, aggressive and gritty take on Middle Eastern music, the track, with vocals from Fat Joe and Remy Ma, went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks.

Released as the lead single for the collective’s sophomore album, True Story, the song propelled the project to number seven on the Billboard 200 and helped Remy Ma break into the mainstream as a new female rapper.

Fat Joe had been a successful emcee since the mid-1990s and, alongside the late Big Pun, was one of the first Latino rappers to gain commercial success, changed the face of East Coast rap music. The pair shook up the New York scene and were inseparable from another, but that all changed in 2000, when Big Pun died.

Following the death of his best friend and protégé, the ‘What’s Luv?’ lyricist built himself up as a solo artist. However, in 2004, the Terror Squad went out with a bang and ‘Lean Back’ was the product of some particularly unique influences.

At the 2022 BET Hip-Hop Awards, Fat Joe and Remy Ma performed the Terror Squad smash, but before the performance, during a red carpet interview with HipHopDX, Fat Joe unveiled that the concept of a song based around a dance move came from Jamaican dancehall music which was prevalent at the time in New York. 

Recalling the musical environment, Joe told the publication, “So at the time, Jamaican music was really really killin’ ’em, and I said ‘I need somethin’ to rock away and lean back.’ So when I made [the song], I made the dance for it. We knew off rip that thing, it was outta here. Every now and then, you make a song that’s like, ‘Oh no, this is gone. This outta here.’ Yeah, that was it.”

During the early 2000s, Dancehall music was just beginning to break into American culture with figures such as Beenie Man and Elephant Man often getting asked to appear on remixes of American hip-hop tunes. In fact, the latter was renowned for his dancing.

With tracks such as ‘Pon de River,’ ‘Willie Bounce’ and ‘Signal De Plane’ having such a large impact internationally in 2003 (although not in the US), it is unsurprising Joe was sure he had a hit on his hands with ‘Lean Back’ and he was correct, as it peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.