Fat Joe joined R&B legend Ashanti on Instagram Live, Saturday, and revealed that Irv Gotti and Ja Rule originally wanted to swap out Ashanti for Jennifer Lopez, because they wanted “the Latinos on this.”
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“Irv and Ja had called me, and they woke me up [at] like 3 in the morning, and they say, ‘Yo, come down, we made a song for you,” he recalls. “I go to the studio, it was like 4 in the morning. They played ‘What’s Luv?’ and you on it. And they was telling me, ‘Yo, this is for you and J. Lo. We want the Latinos on this.”
Joe says he was taken away by Ashanti’s vocals and said she deserved to be there: “I was like, yo, J. Lo? She [Ashanti] sound amazing on here. I was like, ‘Nah, we leaving her there.'”
The story was news to Ashanti as much as it was news to any of the listeners. She reacted with an emphatic “What?,” after Joe finished.
“What’s Luv?,” featuring Ashanti’s vocals, went to peak at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and remained on the charts for 20 weeks. It remains one of the most popular tracks on both artist’s discographies.
[Via]
