Fat Joe: The Elephant in the Room

50 Cent has good reason to be shedding tears; his previous release can’t hold a crack pipe to Fat Joe’s all-around solid streets album. Never mind “making it rain.” The Elephant in the Room marks the return of “Joey Crack.” With a track list that includes song titles like “The Crackhouse,” “Cocababy,” “That White,” and “The Fugitive,” Fat Joe brings real “street bangers” from start to finish.
Spanning his fifteen-year career, Fat Joe has seven previous albums under his belt. He’s a prime candidate for putting out an album about how hard the Bronx made him, or how he’s now a reformed millionaire, with street cred by default, and his own basketball team. No, thanks; we don’t need another “Gray-Hova.”
Luckily, his reminiscences (“I remember when I stepped in the game,” from “The Fugitive”) are few and far between, as Joey keeps it current. He’s in the streets, he’s speaking to the streets, and therefore, he’s short of paying any kind of “homage” to the streets that would lose our interest. Rather than offer contrived notions of how to clean up the ghettos, he instead lets the streets be the streets, presenting himself as an authentic street thug, one dedicated to all things “coca” (“Coca…muah!”). It’s hard not to get lost in his world of white, and frankly, it’s refreshing to hear coke raps from someone other than Clipse. Joey’s authenticity and Borinquen flow, paired with slick production (Scott Storch, Cool & Dre, Danja, DJ Khaled, DJ Premier, Swizz Beatz, The Alchemist, The Hitmen), are what make the album beat as hard as it does.
Cool & Dre produced two songs that account for the album’s raw edge. “You Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’,” backed by driving piano and grand horns, reminds us money speaks louder than anything. Fat Joe prefaces, “If it ain’t about money, it ain’t about shit, nigga.” The production duo are also responsible for one of the harder tracks, “The Crackhouse,” which features Lil’ Wayne on the long-winded, yet catchy hook. With drums and beats as fat, greasy, and grinding as these, there’s no mistaking this as anything but a loud welcome to the crack house, where there are “more bodies than the frat house.”
The catchiest drug-endorsing anthem on the album is “Cocababy,” produced by Danja. Featuring a female-sung hook — “Got trees, got lean, pop E, codeine/ Cocababy, you know it’s me” — it’s one of the flashiest-sounding songs Fat Joe has to offer, and also rumored to be the album’s next single. Similar to this is the Swizzy-produced “Drop,” full of energized claps, mamis saying, “Oww!” and the rapper/producer’s own trademark, “Showtime!”
He’s rounded up fresh producers to make fresher sounds, sounds so slick they couldn’t be stamped as anything other than “today’s” rap music. Although the slew of talented producers keep it current, perhaps even projecting rap towards where it should be, there’s still room for older samples that fit into the patchwork just as successfully. In “K.A.R. (Kill All Rats)” the sampled vocals of Marlena Shaw ask, “How do we get rid of rats in the ghetto?” Fat Joe responds convincingly, “K-k-k-kill ‘em!” Meanwhile, “300 Brolic” is a song for the street soldiers across the nation. Built off of staccato snare drums played taut, precise operatic vocals, and anticipatory string arrangements, it’s suspenseful enough to sound like the opening credits of a Puerto Rican gangster film.
With so many hard-edged songs (i.e. “That White,” “The Crackhouse,” “300 Brolic”), Fat Joe could’ve chosen almost any of them to lead his sales. He went, however, with the mediocre “I Won’t Tell,” a song about creeping around with a female (I guess when Usher’s back telling everyone they should be making love in the club, that’s what a thug’s gotta do). When there are too many songs that better represent the album’s strength, sound and message it’s hard to agree that this was a worthy single. At least this way, the singles will only get more satisfying. For now I’ll put The Elephant in the Room in the running for one of the highest-scoring rap albums of the year.