It was Ja’s second movie role, and he got paid only $15,000 for his work. In 2001, when Ja Rule’s commercial takeover was still in progress, he took a role in The Fast And The Furious, a low-budget studio B-movie about LA street racers who steal shipments of DVD players from moving trucks.
And then there are the smaller fuckups that turned out to have real consequences - things like what happened with The Fast And The Furious. There’s the whole glorious latter-day Fyre Fest episode. There’s the way 50 Cent, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, yanked the rug out from under Ja, clowning him hard during every single twist and turn of their feud and making himself into a titan at Ja’s expense. There’s the way that Ja’s label boss, never a street guy himself, put himself in serious legal jeopardy by getting involved with legendarily cold-blooded Queens street figures. You can’t even talk about Ja Rule’s whole run without mentioning the obvious boondoggles. At a certain point, the silliness becomes the legacy. There are so many funny things about Ja Rule’s whole career, so many little cautionary tales embedded in the whole arc.
In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
