Fat Joe has seen it all in the rap game and he has dished out some sobering career advice for artists trying to make it in the industry.
Joey Crack took to Instagram Live over the weekend where he essentially told aspiring rappers it’s time to get a consistent job as their “plan A” in life if their rhymes aren’t bringing in a check.
“If your man said he raps and he don’t have a deal. There’s a problem with that,” he told the ladies in the virtual audience. “It’s called plan A, get a job. Plan B, hope you make it. This has never changed.
“Some guys be like, ‘I gotta get a regular job?’ Bro, you gotta get a job! If you got kids and you got this girl that got an apartment and y’all sexin’ it up every day, you got to pay some bills.”
Fat Joe continued while quoting Nas classic “Life’s A Bitch”: “And that dollar and a dream — ‘That buck that bought the bottle could’ve struck the lotto.’ Nah!”
The Hip-Hop Wolf reposted Joe’s brutally honest comments and some weren’t happy with the tough pill to swallow.
“It’s too many people out here telling people how to live their lives,” one person wrote to Instagram. “I bet Joe would have hated for someone to tell him that and crush his dreams when he was coming up. Smh! Then he brings the women into it to make matters worse Smh!”
While it might sound like he’s urging aspiring rappers to take any record deal thrown their way to get some money, Joe has also spoken out in the past about his belief that the major label system is a Ponzi scheme.
“I don’t believe in these people. For one, I feel like the major label system is a Ponzi scheme and they do funny math,” he explained. “Whenever you try to see something in life, they say numbers don’t lie. If you look at a chart and the numbers are so clear where you could say, ‘The price of this is this, the price of this is this.’
“And then when you look at a chart and they say 62.1 percent 1.2 — it’s funny math. And so we never understood, we never recouped, you know, you had to be like the Fugees who sold 30 million records to make a dollar.”
[via]