Dear Fat Joe,

By: T.R. Slyder, TRSlyder@yahoo.com


Dear Jose Gordo,

I really enjoy your "collabo" with Li'l Wayne, "Make it Rain". While I am fully aware that you bill yourself as a "Don", and possess a staggering degree of street credibility, I must call into question your ability to identify people with an exorbitant amount of mettle. In your opening line you rap "Cr-Cr-Crack, Crack, Crack, Crack, Crack you hear the Echo, man I seen the best go, 'cause he ain't have that mettle."

Now if someone were to be "the best", wouldn't he, in all liklihood, have "that mettle"? Isn't that like saying, "That gentleman is the tallest guy on this bus. But 4 people are clearly taller."? Furthermore, if he is, as you assert, "the best" and he did indeed, "go", doesn't that call into question his besthood?

Even if the word "mettle" is intended to be "metal", symbolicly meaning "gun", your argument still doesn't hold water for the reasons I have stated. One cannot help but assume that "The best" would possess mettle and metal. For the best not to have mettle/metal sounds like quite the Shakespearean tragic flaw, indeed. So much so that I find it to be an unbelievable theoretical.

Since I do not wish to sound exclusively negative in this treatise, I will offer you some well-earned praise as well. Congratulations on liberally using the n-word, despite being Puerto Rican. No badge of urban acceptance shines brighter for a non-black than to use that hateful slur without being questioned for it by blacks. Not only that, but about a decade you parlayed that credibility into a thug-friendly dance craze known, not-so-cryptically as The Lean Back, where the thug leans back a little and calls it dancing. Choreographical genius.

You inspire all of us Fat Joe,


Lithe T.R.