Fat Joe on Being Saved From Having to Freestyle in Biggie and 2Pac Cypher
Written by SOURCE on May 5, 2023
Fat Joe says Big Daddy Kane “saved” him from having to launch into a key freestyle moment alongside 2Pac and Biggie.
The moment in question was discussed at length in the recent premiere of the new podcast Iconic Records, hosted by Angie Martinez. Preceding it around the 21:40 mark in the video below was a question from the host about whether there was realistically any competition against Biggie when it came to the “King of New York” status in the early ‘90s.
While there were others in the mix, Joe said, Biggie was “breaking so many boundaries” and “doing shit we’d never seen before.” At the time, he added, he was an artist whose level of greatness forced everyone else to “sharpen their swords” or risk getting left behind.
This led into a question about the classic Madison Square Garden cypher with 2Pac and Biggie in 1993.
“Man, I was in the front row watching Big Daddy Kane do his set and all of a sudden you see the crowd—the whole crowd—turn back, like, looking at the entrance, the tunnel … and it was Pac and B.I.G.,” Joe recalled.
The crowd was absolutely losing it, Joe said, as he pinpointed the exact moment he was spotted and asked to join them up on the stage.
“So while they was walking, they see me,” he said. “So Pac is like, ‘Yo, come on, Crack, come on!’ So I go with them. We go up on the stage. I think Shyheim was there too from Wu-Tang, Shyheim the Rugged Child. We went upstage and then they start that cypher, that ‘I got seven MAC-11’s, about eight 38’s, nine 9’s.’ You wanna talk about standing next to somebody? I was on fucking stage with Biggie and Pac!”
Joe says he was “nervous as fuck” at the time, crediting Kane with saving him thanks to a timely interruption.
“All I had was ‘Flow Joe,’” he said. “I ain’t had no bars ready, nothing. Big Daddy Kane might have saved me because I would have did some shit. And they passed me the mic [like] ‘Yo, Fat Joe!’ and then Big Daddy Kane interrupts and goes, ‘Yo, yo. We ain’t got no time.’”
Closing out his reflection on the 1993 cypher, Joe reiterated the personal importance of the moment.
“They saved me,” he said.
See the full interview below.
