Turning 40 nearly pushed Fat Joe to walk away from rap.
On Tuesday (October 28), the Terror Squad veteran and Jadakiss hosted Ciara on their Joe and Jada podcast, where they offered the singer some advice as she approached her own 40th birthday.
Around the four-minute mark of the episode, Fat Joe opened up about how he went through a period of “depression” when he hit that milestone age.
“I’ve been rapping, I’ve been in the game since I’m 19. So, when I’m about to turn 40, all I know is standing on couches and popping bottles,” he said. “But that 40 hit you like a different, like… I was depressed.”
Joe went on to admit that he had “never [seen] a rapper hit one out the park after 40.” But a pep talk from his longtime collaborator and producer Dre of Cool & Dre helped shift his perspective.
“So my man Dre [from] Cool & Dre came over on my birthday. I was straight depressed and he was like, ‘Yo, Joe, you know Tina Turner ain’t have her first hit till she was 47.’ So he start breaking all this down. Made me feel a lot better,” Joe recalled. “‘Cause I was scared of what the future was for what we’re doing.”
He continued, “So what we’re doing is we’re selling this brand. We’re selling this and this and that. And then, for a guy like me, it felt like, Oh, they know I’m old now.”
Eventually, Joe said he reached a place where life “felt brand new again,” adding that “fifty felt better than forty.”
Jadakiss chimed in too, revealing that he once planned to retire at 30 years old.
“I remember saying, I don’t want to rap at 30. I was nowhere next to when 30 came. That was out of the fucking question,” Jadakiss recalled. “Then when forty came, I’m like, ‘Yo, got to live a little.’ I didn’t feel done—I felt like I had a lot more work to do.”
While rappers like Black Thought, Raekwon, and Lil Wayne continue to thrive well into their forties and beyond, André 3000—now 50—has often expressed that rapping feels like a young person’s game.
“I ain’t got no raps like that. It actually feels… sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way,” he told GQ in 2023.
“I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does,” he continued. “And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’ You can find cool ways to say it, but…”
