This weekend Fat Joe stopped by Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk for a candid conversation about the music industry, his journey, and more. During the discussion, Fat Joe was asked by a viewer which two people he’d bring back from the dead and why. The award-winning rapper didn’t lean back.
“Well, you know, uh, if it was just music, it would be Biggie and Big Pun,” Joe responded. “You know, oh my God, these guys died so young. They were good friends, man; they were brothers.”
Big Pun and Fat Joe’s relationship goes back years. In fact, it was Fat Joe who discovered Big Pun and helped him get his first album, Jealous One’s Envy, off the ground in the mid-1990s.
“My best time in life was when I discovered Big Pun, and we went through everything. We got rich together; we got famous together. Big Pun was funny. He was so crazy. He used to call me the fun killer. They used to say when I came in the room, ‘hey, what’s this guy doing in here?’ I mean, these guys were a hot mess.”
But Fat Joe had a strong relationship with the Notorious BIG as well.
“Biggie was my brother since day one, too. He was such a beautiful guy like, he didn’t have to pass away. It was really sad.”
Twitter is shocked
And while Fat Joe wanting to bring Big Pun back isn’t a shock to anyone, mentioning Biggie was a surprise to some folks on social.
“Big Pun was NOT a surprise answer but Biggie was….bc I was expecting him to say Big L and Pun……” wrote one user on Twitter.
Indeed. Big Pun and Fat Joe were getting traction in 1997 when Biggie Smalls passed, the same year Big Pun began recording for Capital Punishment. And while it is far from unbelievable that Fat Joe had a close relationship with Biggie, it isn’t as if the two had some publicly known partnership in hip hop. It was Fat Joe and Big Pun. That’s how the fans knew them. The pair were inseparable.
However, as Big Pun began to see success, it became clear that he needed to make changes in his life.
Pun even referenced the effort in his hit song “It’s So Hard” where he reasons, “I just lost a hundred pounds baby, I’m trying to live.” Sadly, however, Big Pun passed the same year.
You can catch Fat Joe’s full interview with Jada Pinkett Smith on Red Table Talk’s Facebook page, streaming this weekend.
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