Turning 40 years old almost made Fat Joe leave rap behind.
The Terror Squad member and Jadakiss hosted Ciara on the Tuesday (October 28) episode of podcast Joe and Jada, giving the vocalist some wisdom in time for her fortieth birthday.
Around the four-minute mark of the video below, Joey Crack revealed that he underwent a period of "depression" when reaching middle 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 explained. "But that 40 hit you like a different, like... I was depressed."
Joe added that he'd "never [seen] a rapper hit one out the park after 40." But it was advice from the rapper's longtime producer that helped get Joe out of a rut regarding his age.
"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."
"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."
But Joe reached a point where his life "felt brand new again," and he added that "fifty felt better than forty." Jada also jumped in, revealing that he 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," he said. "Then when forty came, I'm like, 'Yo, got to live a little.' I didn't feel I felt like I had a lot of more work to do."
Rappers like Black Thought, Raekwon and Lil Wayne are still thriving in their forties and older, but André 3000, who's 50, has repeatedly shared his opinion that rapping seems 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…."