Honestly I was surprised by how well I remembered this album. I didn't think of it as a record I knew particularly well, but I must have gone through a phase where I listened to it a whole lot, because literally every song triggered those little recall bells in some spot buried in my brain from 20 years ago. This is Joe completing his transition from DITC backpacker to pop star; you can still detect his grimy street roots breaking through the smooth sheen. It's also Joe fresh from losing Pun, his most significant discovery, but aside from the intro (I think it's a classy move to open the album with a plainspoken Pun tribute) & a few moments on "Still Real," there's not much mourning happening here. Instead, we get a solid album's worth of gritty beats full of ominous pianos & strings, & a prime example of early 2000s hyper-macho, radio-ready gangsta rap.
Joe was never the most impressive emcee, but he intimately understands his own limitations. He doesn't try to pull off intricate lyrics (at least, not since Pun passed) or tricky vocal rhythms. He also understands his strengths: straightforward flows, less concerned with rhythmic pocket than knocking you on the head with booming declarations; Joe sounds credible making the kind of tough-guy threats that could easily come off corny in another rapper's mouth. But Joe's most important strength is not as a rapper but rather as an executive producer: he has a great ear for beats & a keen sense of whom to collaborate with.
Although only 1 producer handles multiple tracks (Buckwild with album highlights "My Lifestyle" & "Still Real"), the record has a surprisingly unified sound. In my review of the comparable Kool G Rap album The Giancana Story, I wrote:
"This is quintessential early 2000s New York street rap, post-boombap--samples were out, MIDI was in. (A lot of this was by necessity, as music publishers were cracking down on sample clearance.) [...] The overall feel is noisy, aggressive, thickly textured beats, but with a lot of polish, if you like that sort of thing."
Even though it shares 4 producers with Giancana, J.O.S.E. has no such problem. The reason probably has to do with label politics (I don't know to what extent Rawkus let G Rap choose his own beats) & budget. Either way, we get Alchemist bringing filtered keys & punchy drums to "Definition of a Don"; Psycho Les lacing the title track with eerie chords & a creative drum pattern (lacking a kick on the downbeat, creating a distinctively Beatnuts-y off-kilter feel); & Cool & Dre with the epic orchestrals of the hard-ass Buju Banton feature "King of N.Y." Sadly, since we all know I'm full of VA pride, Bink! does not impress here. The bubbling synths of "Get the Hell On With That" are way too polished & goofy, not to mention that most of the verses are devoted to slut-shaming. Ludacris contributes a reliably solid guest verse, but other than that it's the album's only real skip.
One thing I appreciate about gangsta rap from my era is that, for the most part, they kept the violence & sex separate. Like on this album: we get songs about shooting people up, & songs about honeys, but usually the 2 stay separate. Nowadays all bets are off--street rappers are fond of threatening to shoot you up & then f**k your b***h, which I don't understand because if I were to murder someone, sex would be the last thing on my mind. (Busta Rhymes does do this here on the "We Thuggin'" remix: "Get my rocks off, that's when I'm quick to knock your block off/& hold a gat when I'm fuckin' and never take my socks off," but that's the exception.)
Nonetheless, what we do get a lot of in songs like "Opposites Attract (What They Like)," "We Thuggin'" & "What's Luv?" is objectification of women. One of the first lines in "What's Luv?" pretty much sums it up: "Girl, you get me aroused how you look in my eye/But you talk too much, man, you're ruinin' my high." Women in Joe's world are to be seen & not heard, which might seem odd given how much Remy Ma there is on this album (she has verses on 3 songs & does the hook on an additional 1), but there is an unspoken understanding that there are 2 types of women. Remy is one type--the type whose mind is to be valued & whose perspective is to be respected. The unnamed club girls of "We Thuggin'" represent the other type of women--those who are valuable only for their visual appearance & as sex objects. The difference between the 2 is not made explicit, but we can make some inferences: Remy's aggressive rap flow & violent rhetoric are coded as masculine, which gives her value in this macho world. The overall rejection of femininity as something without value might seem to clash with the casual f-slur Joe drops in "Murder Rap," but in recent years Joe has become an unlikely advocate for LGBTQ+ individuals in hiphop. ("Murder Rap" is also the song where he claims to be "the cause of dope fiends getting AIDS infections," which is a bizarre thing to brag about, so I have a lot of questions.)
Fat Joe has always been a better businessman than rapper. In 2001, he saw his moment & took it: J.O.S.E. was & remains his only platinum-selling album, although he seems to find a way to pull off a huge radio single every decade or so. But on this album's "Still Real," the obligatory "thugs have feelings too" track, I do appreciate the chorus line "to get where I'm going to." The line suggests that his story, & by extension ours, is not finished, that progress is ongoing & eternal. Like how after over a decade of not-much-to-speak-of, he & Remy slapped us with "All the Way Up" & suddenly ended up in the spotlight again. Don't count the dude out. This isn't anywhere close to being the best album of its era, but it's probably Fat Joe's best album--even though I like his early DITC stuff too. For fin de siècle mainstream gangsta rap, you could do a lot worse.
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