Fat Joe Talks Having Two Hooks on Each Single, “Another Round” and “Pride N Joy”

Fat Joe has discovered a new method for making hit records. It’s what he calls, “cheating.” The rap veteran points out that if fans listened to his current singles— “Another Round,” featuring Chris Brown, and “Pride N Joy,” featuring Kanye West—Joey Crack doubles up with two choruses on each track.

“You gotta cheat man,” Joe said while talking to XXL last week. “At the end of the day, real hip-hop heads wanna hear real lyrics of course. We give them real lyrics, but what makes a hit is the beat and the hook.

“So I’ve been figuring out, ‘What if we put two dope hooks on there? It’ll just be bigger,’” Joe continued. “It’s like a chant. Its stands out, it’ll be something you’ll always know. Like on the Chris Brown ‘Another Round’ …‘I used to want you and her and her and her...’ Then I’m coming in with the “shorty got a mean walk, a mean shoe game…”  That’s like [another] hook right there.”

“Pride N Joy,” had a slightly different sound to it originally. That is, until Kanye convinced Joe that one of the hooks on the record should be sang by a singer, but rather chanted by a slew of MCs.

“The session was crazy because originally Rico Love had wrote a hook and Kanye was like, ‘Yo man, that is crazy, but it’s real R&B…I wanna bring it back to the hip-hop,’” Joe recalled. “I was looking at him like ‘What you talking about?’ He was like, ‘Imagine if it’s a bunch of rappers just singing that, rather than a R&B singer singing that, even its all about the money I don’t really care…’

The next step was making it a star-studded affair.

“He called up a bunch of artists that were in New York; Busta, Khaled, Jada, Mos Def,” added Joe, who has a penchant for telling great stories. “Everybody came to the studio. I’m glad they were all down for it. When was the last time you seen a bunch of legends and icons singing together? It ain’t been nothing like that since Native Tongue with [Queen] Latifah, Busta, De La Soul. Kanye said, ‘Yo, I’m Kanye West, this is what you come to me for.’ I was like, ‘Alright Ye.’”—Shaheem Reid