Fat Joe Credits Elephant Man’s Dancehall Dance Moves For Inspiring Hit Song ‘Lean Back’

Bronx, New York rapper Fat Joe says if it weren’t for the Dancehall and Reggae movement back in the mid-2000s, he wouldn’t have created his hit single Lean Back that has had fans around the world leaning back for the last 17 years.

The track was one of Joe’s biggest releases under the Hip Hop group Terror Squad, which included himself, Remy Ma, DJ Khaled, the late Big Pun plus others. After its release in the summer of 2004, Lean Back topped both the US Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks charts, grabbing major buzz in the media and massive airplay on the club scene.

Now almost two decades later, Fat Joe admits that the hook, which motion dancers to simply ‘lean’ or slowly throwback a shoulder to the beat was inspired by Jamaican dance moves like the Rockaway and Signal The Plane. The hook even says, “My n-ggas don’t dance, they just pull up their pants and do the Rockaway and lean back lean back…”

In speaking with Dancehall sensation Sean Paul on his Instagram show TFJS, two days ago Joe said, “I made lean back because of the Reggae movement. So when I come up with the hook, all that Signal The Plane and Rockaway everybody was doing all that and I said man I need a hook like the Reggae guys.”

He started singing a part of the hook, “Ah lean back, ah lean back,” then added, “That’s how I came up with that, it was really influenced by the Reggae movement.”

Moved by the admission, Paul said he loved it when other artists like Joe are influenced by the genre and go on to release songs that turn into huge hits. “Respect bro! So off a dat inspiration, off ah what people doing in Reggae and Dancehall you create a classic Hip Hop joint man,” he said. “That feeling …you can’t explain that to nobody.”

Fat Joe, on the contrary, was accused of “stealing” the dance move by its captain, Dancehall star Elephant Man.

Just last year, the Energy God claimed that several of his ‘dancing’ themed songs were stolen by leading international acts and pointed out Fat Joe as one of them. “Fat Joe come and take Rockaway, him no know weh it come from,” he said on an episode of Magnum’s Spice It Up talk show last December.

In 2019, it was revealed that Toronto writer Bee Quammie may have been responsible for introducing Joe to the dance move. According to HotNewHipHop, Bee dished on her happenstance meeting with Fat Joe. “I snuck into a Club Bed in Miami when I was underage, was dancing during the reggae set, and Fat Joe asked me to teach him the dance I was doing,” she wrote in a Tweet.

“It was the Rockaway, and he recorded Lean Back the next week. I had told my brother about meeting Fat Joe, then literally a week later he told me he had something to play for me. He had downloaded Lean Back off Napster.” When someone told her that Fat Joe owes her money for taking the dance, she said it’s bigger than her. “He owes Jamaica money! I remember this cause I was a kid and Jamaicans were furious and I think a few artists made songs about it too.”

As the discussion with Sean Paul continued, the rap star expressed his disappointment with other international acts who he said, “Take from Jamaica … take riddims, melodies, flows and don’t keep it real with Jamaica like they’re supposed to.”

It prompted the argument from Paul that many artists from sub-genres like Reggaeton, Afrobeat, Trinibad, and Zess music which are all heavily influenced by Reggae and Dancehall don’t give Jamaica the credit it fully deserves.

Similarly with top artists such as ‘Justin Bieber, Drake, Swae Lee, French Montana and Ed Sheeran,’ he said, some of their songs are very ‘Dancehall oriented’.  “I just want them to say that, I just want them to say, ‘Yo big up to Dancehall world and ah want them to also name songs (that influence them)… say Garnet Silk,” he urged.

Paul cited Bajan songstress Rihanna along with DJ Khaled as two of the loyal few who have always hailed and “Bigs up our culture,” to which Joe whole-heartedly agreed.

Khaled recently brought up a similar discussion on his latest episode of First One Podcast on Amazon Music last week.  The guest on the show was, sure enough, Justin Bieber, who Khaled asked if his 2015 hit Sorry, was inspired by Dancehall and Reggae since the track clearly has distinct Dancehall drum beats and an accompanying music video that drew heavily on Dancehall fashion and dance moves dating back to the 1990s.

Bieber however failed to directly credit Jamaican and Dancehall culture but rather described the beat for the track as “Island music”.

Like with many international artists that snag beats from the genre, it could be said that they simply don’t understand what Reggae and Dancehall music is or what it represents.

But thanks to the genre’s innovative dance moves back in the day, Lean Back was released as the second single from Terror Squad’s second studio album, True Story, on June 8, 2004. In 2008, the song was listed on VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop. Watch below –