BET Talks: Fat Joe Talks About His Love For Hip-Hop
Tonight is the night.
The "BET Hip Hop Awards" are back with Fat Joe on hosting duties again, and we're making sure hip-hop enjoys its 50th birthday with star-studded performances, honoring our legends, and highlighting the future.
Before he hits the stage with a few surprises up his sleeve, he sat down with BET.com to chat about how honored he is to host this year,
"It's an honor, it's a blessing, and it's a dream come true since I always wanted to be apart of the rap game," Joe tells BET.com.
"I started out at the Apollo Theater and I won amateur night four weeks in a row -- the road led down to this. This is the biggest platform, the biggest even for Hip-Hop 50, and it's such an honor."
The Bronx native went down memory lane on how DJ Red Alert, who happened to be in the crowd during one of his sets at the Apollo Theater back then, changed his life.
"He put me on," he began.
"I was winning the Apollo every week and I couldn't understand how. I had to sit back and think how I kept doing it. People just loved me and they went crazy every time I came out. Red Alert came up to me asking if I had any tracks and said I was a star. I gave him a demo of my first single 'Flow Joe.' He changed my life."
The Terror Squad member walks us through how he ended up having so much passion for the genre, sharing his earliest memory on when he fell in love with hip-hop.
"I grew up in the Bronx, which is the birthplace of hip-hop," he began.
"In my projects, I would see Melly Mel and Scorpio all the time. These guys were the biggest rappers on earth so for the first ten years of hip-hop, everyone that was popping was born in the Bronx. One day I watched Melly Mel playing basketball and the next day I see him at the Grammys with Chaka Khan. It was so unreal but I blessed to be born in the Mecca of hip-hop."
Watch the interview now and tune in to see Fat Joe tear the house down tonight on the "BET Hip Hop Awards" at 8/7c on BET.
