Common Recalls Fat Joe Saving His Life During Feud With Mack 10 & Ice Cube: ‘You Settled That’

About three decades later, Common is thanking Fat Joe for saving his life. The Chicago rapper joined Joe & Jada earlier this week, where he recalled shooting a commercial in the mid-’90s on the West Coast when an altercation nearly broke out amid his feud with Ice Cube and Mack 10.

“That man really saved my life. I was out on the West Coast with one of my guys I knew and he just wasn’t happy with the whole Mack 10 [and] Ice Cube beef that we had,” he said.

Essentially, one of Common’s friends escalated a situation, and before it crossed the line, Fat Joe stepped in to smooth things over — at least for Common.

“It’s not cuz Fat Joe is tougher than anyone. I literally begged for your life. I literally got in the middle, ‘He’s my friend, he’s my brother,’” Joe recalled. “They finally saw him on their soil and they was talking crazy and I was like, ‘This is literally my brother and I was begging them.’ It was the serious ones … Basically, I stood in the middle. It was over after that day.”

Common confirmed the beef was squashed from his side from that point forward and compared Joe’s intervention to a scene straight out of a movie.

“You settled that. I’m like, ‘Man, we in California, don’t start nothing.’ They already wanted a piece on me no matter what,” he explained. “My guy out there going off. I knew it was [Joe] that said, ‘This can’t happen.’ … That’s when Fat Joe the gangsta, this n—a here because he was straight up like, ‘You can’t do that to my man.’ It was like one of them movies, Goodfellas.”

Common etched his name in rap history with his acclaimed and scathing diss track “The Bitch in Yoo,” which was released in 1996 and took aim at Ice Cube, raising tensions with the West Coast.

During a 2020 interview with DJ VLAD, Mack 10 rehashed the near-altercation with Common and reiterated that Fat Joe stepped in to smooth things over. “Common is all right. Ain’t nobody got no issues,” Mack said. “Everybody grown. We done seen each other a million times since then.”

Watch the Joe & Jada episode with Common below. Talk about saving Common’s life begins just short of four minutes.