Can J Cole recover from the embarrassment of Kendrick and Drake beef?
Following J. Cole withdrawing from what has been touted as the great rap war of 2024, the response from his contemporaries has been mixed. Benny the Butcher praised Cole for his decision to take the high road saying in a recent interview with Fight Hype, “That’s my dawg. You can see how gossip-y and everything that this battle has turned into. Can you blame him for not wanting to be a part of this at this moment. Could you blame him? I don’t.”
When asked if Cole did the right thing, Benny responded with, “I probably would have went about it in a different way, but it’s like a gossip battle, you know what I mean. It’s not like a rap battle, it’s like a business, telling each other business type thing. I wouldn’t want to be a part of that.”
NPR, in agreement with The Butcher summed up the entire situation as merely an exercise to garner attention. “If that feels like an anticlimactic outcome for hip-hop’s reigning titans squaring off, blame it on the context-flattening effect of our current social reality. Rap purists and pop number-crunchers are all wading around in the same murky discourse soup, and a lot of the metrics that used to feel like a given are looser now, superimposing a shape on something gray and amorphous.”
“It figures, then, that the truest means of ascent is to try and to get to the top of the trending list, and to stay as long as possible; the only thing of equal value to everyone is collective attention. The diehards will never admit it, but beef has become far more about the drama than the bars or even the hostility, which explains both the overenthusiasm for a pretty down-the-middle shot from Kendrick, and the sourpuss complaints about Cole’s retraction.”
On the other side of the fence, however, others have chimed in condemning the Fayetteville rapper for his actions.
The Game took to X (formerly twitter) to show his distaste for how hip hop beef is handled in the modern era. “Hip hop/Rap or whatever yall calling it these days was already watered down, then Cole apologised and turned this sh*t into Kool-Aid [with] no sugar.”
Fat Joe, in an interview with Jay Shetty, said that, “[Cole] probably saw that it could get real messy and real ugly and so he said, ‘Yo, you know what, this ain’t me I don’t want no parts of it.’ But he definitely got a stripe off his…they took a stripe off of that, because in hip-hop, they call you out, you come out.”
So what now for Cole? Having polarised the hip hop community with his action, or lack of action, can he continue on as if nothing had happened? Or will he forever be marked as the someone that couldn’t take the heat? In his new track, which was released on Wednesday, ‘Port Antonio’, Cole addresses the situation and its aftermath.
Lines such as, “I pulled the plug because I seen where that was about to go, they wanted blood, they wanted clicks to make they pockets grow / Wouldn’t have lost the battle, dog, I would’ve lost a bro, I would’ve gained a foe, and all for what?”, highlight the bigger picture thinking that Cole was undergoing at the time of the beefs instigation.
Having already cleared the air with Kendrick following his public apology for releasing ‘7-minute drill’ and saying that he felt “lame” and “terrible” for dissing him whilst on stage at Dreamville festival, Cole addresses Drake in the track as well. “Aye Drake, you’ll always be my n***a, I ain’t ashamed to say you did a lot for me, my n***a / Fuck all the narratives, tapping back into your magic pen is what’s imperative.” It appears peace is the only solution that the ‘Work out’ rapper will settle for.
Some bridges have definitely been burned. Hip-hop has always been synonymous with adversity. From those within and those without. That being said, Cole would likely feel vindicated following the desecration of Drake’s legacy that we were all witness to. I’m fairly sure that Drake has to ask for Kendrick’s permission if he wants to put put new music now. I know that sounds outlandish, but I don’t make the rules.
Perhaps we will now see a new version of J Cole, one in which he focuses on himself rather than dragging down those around him. In all honesty though, would that be so different from the version that we already have?