My grandmother only ever loved one rap song. No, it wasn’t that she was a hip-hop hater on a crusade against the genre’s vulgarity or anything like that—she was a fiery woman, barely over five feet tall, who could talk shit with the best of them. She just didn’t care much for modern pop culture. Whenever I popped up at her crib in the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island, she would be sitting at her dining room table cutting up coupons and nibbling on something sweet while the radio was dialed to church music, soul oldies (she liked the Black girl groups of the ’60s), or news from St. Maarten, where she grew up in a small fishing town in the 1940s and 1950s. She otherwise entertained herself by gossiping on the phone, looking for sales in the aisles of Macy’s, and working in the small garden in her backyard. To her annoyance, her garden was surrounded by old broken-down cars that my grandfather refused to scrap and his handbuilt pigeon coop where he kept almost 100 birds. She hated the hell out of them damn birds.
When I first moved to Staten Island from Brooklyn in elementary school, I spent weekday afternoons and sometimes evenings with my grandparents. By that time of the day, my grandmother, a full-time homemaker whom the immediate family called “Baba,” was usually working on dinner, and my grandfather, a retired MTA bus driver named Eddie, was sitting in his chair, quietly taking in old Clint Eastwood shoot-’em-ups. I’d sit and listen to Baba tell me stories from her childhood as Eddie kept one eye on me and one eye on his movie. Finally, he’d get up to go sit on the back porch and watch his birds. That’s when I could bumrush the TV, switch the channel from AMC to BET, and watch rap videos.
Baba would sometimes take a little break from the meal (probably chicken lokri) and pull up a chair next to me while I was glued to Rap City or 106 & Park. She watched but never really said anything as I pointed out my favorites to her. One day, all of a sudden, she started laughing deliriously at one video, blurting out the kind of over-exaggerated guffaw you might expect from Meryl Streep. Real tears formed in her eyes, a reaction I had seen her have only when she’d tell a story about St. Maarten’s farm animals or when she’d clown her husband a little too hard. It was all from Fat Joe and Terror Squad’s No. 1 hit “Lean Back.”
I never really liked “Lean Back” all that much, which made it even more of a shock that it was the song getting a kick out of her. Sure, Fat Joe’s catchy hook and shoulder-swaying rockaway dance was irresistible, but, even back then, I felt that Scott Storch’s bombastic keyboard wizardry (other examples are “Candy Shop” and “Just a Lil Bit”) was corny. There were parts of the beat I dug, like the cinematic intro that Fat Joe apparently requested to have the larger-than-life feel of the opening scene of Belly and the tappable drums that he might have picked up working with Timbaland on Justin Timberlake’s Justified. But I found the melody sort of irritating and repetitive; not helping was that I didn’t take Fat Joe seriously as a rapper until I got older and grew to appreciate the theatricality of his character.
That Remy Ma verse was undeniably tough, though. She made Terror Squad, a C-tier rap group from the Bronx, sound like the coolest clique ever, running around Bloomberg’s New York with the spirit of the vengeful and mystical gang in Assault on Precinct 13. “Listen, we don’t pay admission, and the bouncers don’t check us/And we walk around the metal detectors,” rapped Remy, her cold flow making it clear that social norms didn’t apply to them. The video is great, too. Lots of dramatic slo-mo shots of Fat Joe’s outfit (pink Uptowns, a letterman jacket, a fitted tilted so hard that it has to be stapled to his head), diamond-studded Terror Squad chains, cameos from Lil Jon, DJ Khaled, Kevin Hart, and Remy Ma driving a Bimmer through the streets of New York in a pink fur. Oh, and, of course, the dance. Joe and the whole Terror Squad rocking back and forth, using their free hand to hold up jeans that look like they weigh as much as a bucket of softballs.
A few days later, Baba sat in again for “Lean Back.” This time, she sang along to the hook (“Lean back, lean back”) while crossing her arms and hitting the rockaway. Eventually, I joined in. Later, when my mom came to pick me up, Baba, in her island twang, said, “Junior, show your mutha our dance.” We did it while my mom looked at us with a face that read What the hell is going on here? This went on for weeks. Anytime the video came on, I grabbed her. It was the only time in my life I saw her care about anything happening on a television. Sometimes, I even caught her humming the beat to herself while she fried johnnycakes on the stove.
I never really understood what she loved so much about “Lean Back.” When she first moved from St. Maarten to New York at 18, she lived in the Bronx; did that have something to do with it? Was it because of how close St. Maarten is to Puerto Rico, the island that Joe always repped? Did Fat Joe, with his light complexion and bright eyes reminiscent of some family members, remind her of someone she once knew—a cousin, a friend, or a crush, that lived only in her memories? Or maybe she just really fucked with the Scott Storch rhythm! Joe’s mean-mugging? Remy’s Timbs? You can get attached to the silliest little part of a song and it’ll mean something to you forever.
Baba died a few weeks ago at 82. I never asked her why she liked “Lean Back,” but I knew she never forgot about it. I’ll always think of her when I hear it, too. When I first got into rap journalism, she would ask me, “Ayy, baby, you write about that man?” laughing and doing the dance. By the time I actually did, her dementia had taken hold, filling her mind with hallucinations and paranoia.
The last story she ever told me was about music, one about how when she met my grandfather he was hanging out on the blocks of Stapleton, Staten Island, singing in doo-wop circles with his friends. “He was so cute,” she whispered, not wanting anyone else to hear her be soft for a second.
