The album J Cole used to compete with Kanye West
J Cole is one of Kanye West’s biggest fans, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to go head-to-head with the G.O.O.D. Music boss. In 2013, when Cole caught wind of Ye releasing Yeezus around the same time as Born Sinner, he made it his mission to compete with him rather than shying away from the challenge.
“Instantly the lightbulb [turned on]… it got real,” he told Billboard. “I made one phone call to somebody that would know, just to make sure first. As soon as I got it confirmed, I was like, ‘Yo…’ The idea hit me instantly: ‘You got to go to that date.'”
He continued, “I’m not going to sit [here]… I worked too hard to come a week later after Kanye West drops an amazing album. It’d be like, ‘Oh and J. Cole dropped too, a week later.’ Nah. I’m going to go see him on that date. He’s the greatest. So it’s like, I’m a competitor by nature, so it was instant. It wasn’t even a thought. It’s a definite statement about how I feel about my album, which is confident.”
Born Sinner ended up debuting at number two on the Billboard 200 chart with 297,000 units, but it was only 30,000 less than Yeezus, which sold 327,000. Despite coming up short, the closeness of the two albums served as a testament to Cole’s confidence as an artist.
A self-proclaimed fan of Kanye West, Cole had dreams of working with the Chicago rapper on an entire project. Although the pair collaborated on ‘Looking for Trouble’ as part of the G.O.O.D. Fridays series in 2010, Cole wanted to take things even further.
“With people like that, I just like to earn my own way, earn my keep kind of,” he told Vulture. “I would love to work with him on a major scale. Not just a song here or a song there — I would love to do something extraordinary with him, but I feel like I gotta step my game up and kind of earn my spot before I can worry about that.”
Cole once called The College Dropout a “life-changing” album for him while reflecting on being fully aware of Kanye West for the first time when the music video for ‘Through the Wire’ was released. It was an important moment for Cole, crediting it as the time his addiction to music first began.
“This shit was a life-changing album for me,” he said. “The first time I heard Kanye rap was on ‘Champions’, but the first time I saw him and figured out who he was was when the ‘Through the Wire’ video came out. That was the summer before I went to school, in June of 2002. From that moment, I was like, ‘This n-gga is the truth.’ I was instantly addicted to the music.”
Cole added, “I went and got everything that was unreleased at that time. I was riding with him, to the point that when I got to school that semester in New York, luckily he had a show at S.O.B.’s. and I went. It was a legendary show. His album didn’t come out until like seven months after that, so it was early. That album is all of my memories of my freshman year of college.”