It’s been over a month since Tekashi 69 took the stand against his former comrades in the Nine Trey Bloods, and hip-hop is still weighing in on his perceived betrayal. In a new interview with Big Boy’s Neighborhood in Los Angeles, Tekashi’s fellow New Yorker Fat Joe offered up his own opinion on the younger rapper’s missteps, calling it “the worst thing you could do in the history of mankind.”
Fat Joe, who is a 20+ year veteran of both the rap game and the New York streets, recording with underground rap crew DITC and his own Bronx-based crew Terror Squad over the years, was one of the first rappers to admonish the hardheaded Tekashi about his dark path. “I don’t think he ever was a gangster,” he reiterated to Big Boy and company during his interview. “I was in the streets to begin with, and when you in the streets if you have any bit of brains you become paranoid. As I was in the streets and I transformed into music, I knew how they was jamming everybody up, that’s why I went to music to not go to jail for life.”
Tekashi, of course, is notorious for taking the opposite path, and ended up meeting the same fate that Joe feared; earlier this year, he pled guilty to multiple counts of racketeering, agreeing to testify against his former compatriots in exchange for a much-reduced sentence. This, in Fat Joe’s eyes, is an even worse mistake than his original transgression. “The worst thing you could do in the history of mankind is be a rat,” he asserts during the interview. “You gotta understand, when you tell you destroy families.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Joe talks about his new album Family Ties, due in December this year.
