Fat Joe shocked fans and detractors alike by wishing 50 Cent a very warm and public happy 50th birthday on Instagram, weeks after an apathetic response to a nosy resurfaced claim that he had the rapper lined up for an assassination.
“Curtis Jackson, aka I went to war with him. It’s amazing how an alleged enemy can turn out to be an incredible friend. God bless you my brother 50 more hbd king @50cent,” Fat Joe posted, and let the world know, the war that once lived there, peace now reigns.
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For fans who have supported Hip-Hop for decades, this is huge. The beef between Fat Joe and 50 Cent was once the stuff of legend, filled with venomous diss tracks, unforgettable award show stand-offs, and dick-measuring contests that personified a generation. Their beef started when Fat Joe jumped on Ja Rule’s “New York” while 50 and Ja were in the thick of a brutal, highly publicized war.
The signal sent at the time was unmistakable: Joe had his side. Yet, years after their feud, the backdrop of their rivalry appears less like hatred and more like misplaced loyalty and a quest for hip-hop dignity. Beef with 50 was more about competing than actually not liking him. And Joe, too, realized later he had supported a friend, Ja Rule, and hadn’t fully understood the long-term consequences of it.
Suddenly, there was an unexpected twist: the death of Chris Lighty, a well-liked music executive who had been a close mutual friend of both artists. Lighty’s passing shifted the landscape and granted both men’s grizzled images a humanizing touch and pried the door open to reconciliation.
The door is now wide open for Fat Joe, wide enough that he didn’t have to mind the fresh round of controversy. A few weeks before his birthday message, Terrance “T.A.” Dixon, Fat Joe’s former hype man, filed a lawsuit claiming Joe had once orchestrated a plot to kill 50 Cent when their beef was at a fever pitch. As Dixon would go on to explain, the hit never went down because 50’s bodyguards were “Navy SEAL-type” and scared the hitmen off.
Fat Joe, however, did not address the grave allegation, but instead chose to be gracious. His writing wasn’t centered solely on 50 Cent’s coming-of-age celebration, but rather on maturity, forgiveness, and the unexpected ways that relationships evolve in Hip-Hop.
Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have believed that a birthday wish between the two of them wouldn’t have been a punchline or a jab. Today, it seems to read more like a door has closed on that chapter, and another has opened.
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