Fat-Joe-1

Fat Joe, like any braggadocious rapper worth his salt, isn’t one to shy away from celebrating his own achievements. And, fair enough.

The man has enjoyed a successful career in show business over the course of several decades at this stage, with a bunch of hit records, some Grammy nominations, and a few movie appearances all to his name. But one thing that he feels he doesn’t get enough recognition for is his specific contribution to the English language. As he tells it, Fat Joe introduced a now much-used phrase into the culture.

Earlier this year, in January 2025, Joe sat down for a conversation with Complex to promote his new album The World Changed On Me, which had been released the previous month. He touched on a lot of different subjects throughout the interview, but at one stage, he was asked about the biggest trend that he helped to start, but which, from his perspective, he had never received enough credit for.

He began by staking his claim to being the first rapper to collect sneakers—who knows if that’s true?—but then he mentioned a term that, conceivably, he really did bring into popular usage. “The [phrase] ‘Make it rain,’” he said. “I created that when I made the song.” 

To be fair, ‘Make It Rain,’ which featured Lil Wayne, was certainly a popular song when it was released in 2006. It reached number 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100, which is a fair showing, and it secured a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Critics and audiences were genuinely into it, and it does seem to be the case that the term “make it rain”—meaning to throw cash to strippers in the middle of a performance, making cash rain down upon them—really did fall into common usage after it came out. The phrase came to represent wealth and success, albeit of a very specific kind.

“We had just left the strip club like two days before, making it rain,” Joe explained of the song’s origins, speaking to Complex for an earlier interview in 2011. “And I was like, nobody ever made a song called ‘Make It Rain.’ I thought that was weird. People have been making it rain for years. Why did no one ever make a song about it?”

According to Dictionary.com, Fat Joe and Lil Wayne popularized “make it rain” with their track, which led other rappers to begin using it, too, as in the case of ‘Act A Fool’ by Lil Jon and ‘Make It Rain’ by Travis Porter. So Fat Joe can reasonably lay claim to popularizing the term, then, but his specific assertion that he “created” it when he wrote his song is definitely dubious. The term clearly existed before he recorded it, with Dictionary.com also noting that Urban Dictionary recorded an entry for the phrase “make it rain” in 2005—a year before Fat Joe’s song was released.

The phrase was already in the ether when Fat Joe and Lil Wayne recorded their track, so they can’t claim to have coined it. But perhaps Joe misspoke when he claimed to have “created” it. The term already existed, but there’s a fair argument that he changed its context and weight by using it in his song. Perhaps that does entitle him to some more recognition.