Fat Joe said this week that the Nigerian singer now known as BNXN once performed as Buju and that he publicly shamed the artist into abandoning the name after a television confrontation. "You know there was a guy in Africa, fake guy using the Buju name. I dissed him on TV that was when I was hosting The Wendy Williams show. Shut him down, he changed his name. I told him that there was only one Buju Banton, the don gaga melt down. The TV went back to Africa, the guy changed his name, now he is X1312 or something," Fat Joe said.
The claim matters because BNXN did start his career under the stage name Buju and announced in 2022 that he had changed it. Fat Joe repeated the story on a recent episode of the Joe and Jada podcast, telling listeners, "There is a fake guy in Africa using the Buju name, we dissed him on tv, shut him down, he changed his name. I told him there is only one Buju Banton." Nigerian outlets reported that Fat Joe said he and others pressured BNXN to change his stage name, and that the former Buju’s decision followed the public exchange.
Publicly available reporting also records BNXN’s own explanation for the shift: he moved away from Buju reportedly because of copyright concerns. Daily Post Nigeria noted that the name change was tied to alleged copyright issues, and BNXN formally announced the switch in 2022. Searches for the keyword buju commonly return pages about Jamaican dancehall star Buju Banton, a fact that critics say can create confusion between artists across regions. Buju Banton has explained his own stage name as coming from his mother and being extended to Banton out of admiration for the DJ he knew as Burr Banton. Fat Joe and Buju Banton also spoke together on a recent episode of the Joe and Jada podcast, a separate piece of the unfolding conversation.
The accounts do not line up neatly. Fat Joe frames the sequence as a cause-and-effect: he says he called BNXN out on The Wendy Williams Show and that the televised rebuke directly led to the name change. The documented timeline shows BNXN announced his new stage name in 2022 and attributed the move to copyright concerns, while reports attribute claims of outside pressure to Fat Joe and others. That creates a gap between Fat Joe’s description of events and the public record of when and why BNXN altered his stage name.
Given the available facts, Fat Joe’s version overstates what can be verified. He has said he dissed the artist on television and claimed credit for the subsequent renaming, but BNXN’s 2022 announcement and reported copyright rationale are the only independently documented milestones. In short, Fat Joe’s claim that his TV call-out alone forced the change is not substantiated by the public record; BNXN’s announced move in 2022 for alleged copyright reasons remains the documented explanation.
