Fat Joe — All or Nothing

After enjoying the success of his single "Lean Back", a song he co-wrote with Remy Ma, officially under the name Terror Squad, in November 2004 Fat Joe participates to Ja Rule's single "New York" featuring Jadakiss of The LOX. The song provokes a feud between Don Joe, Jada and 50 Cent, because the latter, who had an ongoing feud with Ja Rule since 1999, complains that his rival has involved the other two emcees in the feud. The new studio album of Fat Joe arrives in the wake of this feud, that lead the Bronx rapper to record a own answer to 50 Cent, "My Fofo".

One third of the tape is produced by Cool & Dre, the rest of the music is handled by DJ Khaled, StreetRunner, Nasty Beatmakers, Just Blaze, Swizz Beatz, The Runners, LV, Timbaland and Lil Jon. The guests are Mashonda, Remy Ma, Nelly, R. Kelly, Lil Jon, Jennifer Lopez, Eminem, and Mase.

After "Don Cartagena" (1998), Fat Joe decides to take a road heading south, leaves the hardcore and heads for the club. "J.O.S.E." (2001) and "Loyalty" (2002) made him take only a couple of stops to look home nostalgically and then march back to the club. Even he doesn't know well where he's going [musically] until the release of "All or Nothing", when he decides to make a clear decision and turn towards Miami.

For his sixth solo album he still relies basically on Cool & Dre and places a few guests. The first comes after six solo tracks, so in the second part of the record Mashonda, Nelly, R. Kelly, JLo and a posse track with Mase, Remy Ma and Lil Jon next to Eminem take shape. The end result is a club-oriented record with some hardcore excerpts and a lot of watered-down average material, a total failure despite the incredible wake that had provided him the single banger "Lean Back" with the Terror Squad.

When the beats are decent, the songs are at least listenable, when even the production isn't acceptable, the track's definitely skippable (almost half the album, but for completeness: "Does Anybody Know", "So Much More", "Rock Ya Body", "Everybody Get Up", "So Hot"). There should be other level producers, maybe only Just Blaze, while disco / radio hit attempts by Timbaland, Swizz Beatz and Scott Storch are watered down by R&B hooks, ballad rhythms, soul samples, they've no luck here and they turn out more less all inappropriate.

In "Safe 2 Say", Joe can't control Public Enemy's hardcore rock. Among the tunes that for one reason or another should be noted, we find the insipid 50 Cent dissing "My Fofo" (well done, even if it will not go down in history, if not for reasons that go beyond the music), and "Hold You Down", Joe's sissiest-sweetest song so far where he continues to exchange versus for four minutes with JLo, both between singing and rapping over an exaggeratedly slow beat created by StreetRunners.

The remix of "Lean Back" is the top track of this disk. Lil Jon rhythm isn't up to the original and there is Eminem — that I remember, paradoxically rejected half a dozen times by Fat Joe ten years earlier when he was an unknown rapper desperately looking for a chance in the industry and today, as a multimillionaire, called back by Don Cartagena himself to try to save, alone and with a single half a minute appearance on what is the remix of the greatest success of the former DITC member's career, his entire sixth studio album in a vain attempt to try to further stretch the success of that hit — who easily steals the scene and the two "Temptations" parts produced by DJ Khaled and LV: Fat Joe determined, but not totally hardcore, the masterpiece comes in the second part, where the beatmaker LV brings out a great boom bap gloomy, demi-mafioso, perfect, bleak on which Joe flows perfectly.

Released by Terror Squad Entertainment and Atlantic Records, distributed by Warner Music Group, the album sells over 100.000 physical copies in its first week (300.000 in one year in the US market), projecting itself at the sixth place in Billboard 200, second among rnb records and first in rap chart. Despite the best chart result achieved in his entire recording career, the numbers prove to be illusory, because this proved to be the lowest first-week sales ever for one of his albums and, overall, his worst-selling album to date. A similar result to that achieved by his group Terror Squad's "True Story" a few months earlier, which had sold just under one hundred thousand physical copies in its opening week. Promoted by a couple of singles ("So Much More", "Get It Poppin'"), the effort receives encouraging responses from music critics, with more or less everyone praising Fat Joe's freshly baked product. However, the boy is still not satisfied, and how could he be?

While his attempt to create a mainstream rap album that would satisfy as many people as possible by placing gangster, party, club, crossover, ballad, rap, pop, pop rap, and sappy R&B hooks, falls on deaf ears — especially with the track destined to become his next hit, "Get It Poppin'", produced by the mastermind behind "Lean Back" (Scott Storch) and showcasing the new rap superstar of the moment (Nelly), [unfortunately] fails to climb beyond number nine on the Hot 100 and a meager top ten in Finland, despite being certified gold by the RIAA within a few months — on the eve of his new album, Don Cartagena set out to compete on equal terms with his new rival 50 Cent commercially, and is therefore disappointed after seeing the sales results and the response from professional reviewers, who don't spare some negative criticism, thus deciding to leave Atlantic and also to remove his own label Terror Squad Entertainment from the major.

Rating: 5/10.