A Rapper Reinvented as a Podcast Star: How Joe Budden Became the Howard Stern of Hip-Hop

This wasn’t how Joe Budden planned on becoming famous. In fact, he didn’t plan much of anything. Now he’s on the charts, but not for his music.

Instead, as of Thursday, Budden had the No. 1 podcast on the iTunes music podcast chart — five slots ahead of the NPR standard-bearer “All Songs Considered.” The Joe Budden Podcast With Rory and Mal is produced at a friend’s house in Queens.

Budden had a brief taste of mainstream success as a rapper with a Top 40 hit in 2003 before his career stalled. Now he has become a kind of volatile elder statesman of hip-hop, holding forth on his podcast, social media and YouTube before an audience of millions. His soliloquies and tirades, whether a careful examination of a rap diss or a nuanced defense of XXXTentacion, the controversial young rapper who was killed in June, lend him a credibility he never quite had as an artist.

Budden is now banking on a new partnership with Spotify to expand on his success. Starting this fall, his podcast will stream exclusively on that platform. (He plans on still uploading videos of the show on YouTube.) The goal, according to Courtney Holt, head of studios and video at Spotify, is to “develop out not just this show, but other shows in the future.” When asked why he thought Spotify was the best home for his show, Budden said simply, “They weren’t afraid of me.”

Seated at the dining room table in his Montclair, New Jersey, home, Budden is just as he seems as a podcast host: expressive and candid and unembarrassed to recount a series of personal and professional misfortunes and poor decisions, from his battles with addiction and messy physical fights that spilled onto social media to rap beefs and shady recording contracts that left him broke for most of his rap career.

He was also accused of beating an ex-girlfriend, and even though charges were dropped, the allegations continue to dog him. “Even if you’re innocent of those things, therapy teaches you to always pay attention to the part that I played in things,” Budden said. “I didn’t do any of that stuff, but how did I get here? I frequented strip clubs, I popped pills. My life was in disarray. It made me say, ‘No more.'”

The Joe Budden Podcast began in 2015 as I’ll Name This Podcast Later. His rap days behind him, Budden is like a retired athlete at a desk on ESPN. He’s brash, opinionated and blunt. And he knows what he’s talking about. His time spent as an artist on a major record label lends him an insider’s perspective, and his disdain for the music industry has only served to boost his credibility. “A key point to his identity as a musician is that he’s been run through the major label ringer,” said Paul Thompson, a freelance music writer based in Los Angeles. “I think his listeners get the sense, and like the sense, that he’s sort of a rogue individual.”

Joseph Anthony Budden Jr. was born in Spanish Harlem in 1980. At 13, he moved to Jersey City with his mother and older brother. He was soon sent to a boarding school in North Carolina. It turned out to be a school that attracted troubled youth. Although he learned to rap there, he returned to New Jersey with an arsenal of bad habits and was soon addicted to angel dust.

“My mom’s mission my entire teenage years was just to save my life,” Budden said. He did, however, check himself into rehab, a deal he struck with his mother in order to attend a prom. “I was the only volunteer in that rehab. Everybody was mandated there by court.” He failed to get a diploma, he said, and by the age of 20 had a son with an older woman.

Shortly after his son was born, a demo he recorded made its way to Def Jam Recordings, which resulted in a record deal for Budden. “I was just rapping as a pastime and I became good at it,” he said. “So much so that by the time my Def Jam contract was in front of me, I didn’t have a rap name.”

Right away he had a hit with “Pump It Up,” and he was nominated for a Grammy, but Budden stalled as a rapper. He lasted at Def Jam until 2007. It was a chaotic time.

“Turmoil everywhere,” he recalled. “The label situation, family situation. My relationship with my first child was nonexistent. I was broke, and I was a new rapper whose career was spiraling downward.”

He thought recording on a smaller label would give him more freedom, but he found himself saddled with yet another bad contract, so he turned to the internet. He started broadcasting his day-to-day life on his YouTube channel, Joe Budden TV.

This led to an offer to join the cast of the VH1 reality series “Love & Hip Hop: New York.” It was an eye-opener. Budden saw it as the perfect vehicle to revive his rap career. Instead, it was a pitiless mirror that revealed an addict in denial. He decided that the way to get off pills was not to go into rehab but to appear on another VH1 reality show, “Couples Therapy.” “I wasn’t going for couples therapy,” Budden said. “I wasn’t going because they were paying me. Drugs were my issue.”

The therapy worked.

And then he decided to quit rapping.

“A large part of me being absent in my first child’s life was rap,” Budden said. He has two sons, Joseph, 17, and Lexington, an 8-month-old, with his current girlfriend, Cynthia Pacheko.

In his new clean state, Budden met Ian Schwartzman, a manager who saw promise in the former rapper. “In terms of what he was capable of doing as a personality,” Schwartzman said, “it was limitless.” He envisioned Budden as the “hip-hop Howard Stern.”

“The perception of him was rough around the edges, a loose cannon,” said Schwartzman. As with Stern, the perception would evolve.

Thirteen years after his only hit record and committed to staying clean, Budden began his second act, becoming a co-host on “Everyday Struggle,” a daily hip-hop news show on Complex Media’s YouTube channel. That platform involved viral moments that would increase Budden’s visibility and complete his transformation from rapper to media personality, including scolding young rapper Lil Yachty and walking out of a Migos interview during the BET Awards.

“Joe knows how to get under artists’ skin,” said Elliott Wilson, a content director at the streaming service Tidal. “He knows how to say the right thing to kind of irritate his fellow artists.”

After a year, Budden would leave “Everyday Struggle” and the following he had amassed on the show to devote himself full time to the podcast he had been recording for three years.

The podcast’s team convenes every Tuesday in Queens, at the home studio of Parks Vallely, the show’s audio engineer. Budden, his co-hosts Rory Farrell and Jamil Clay (Mal), a videographer and an intern, gather as he reads a list of topics off his iPhone that he’s compiled throughout the week. This week’s episode would include women out-earning their male spouses and poking fun at a recent Drake freestyle. The atmosphere in the studio is very much a man cave, and the show has been criticized for sexist comments, an issue Budden said he is trying to correct. “The work is to avoid topics we’re not qualified to speak on,” he said.

“I think they’re doing the best that they can,” said Kitanya Harrison, a freelance writer based in Jamaica, who noted the sexism in a piece about the podcast. “I’m not sure if it’s enough, but I appreciate the effort that they’re doing it public.”

The guys had only just returned from the East Coast leg of the Joe Budden Podcast tour. In a few days, they would head out again, to the West Coast. Clay, one of the co-hosts, recounted the story of a man who told him the podcast prevented him from committing suicide. “I didn’t think that this was life-changing,” Clay said minutes before heading to his usual spot in Vallely’s house to record.

Budden seated himself before the microphone. “Mic check, 1, 2, 1, 2,” he said in his gravelly baritone. The podcast had begun.