The rapper who scared off J Cole: “He wasn’t on that”
When talking about the most commercial rappers, J Cole is considered one of the best MCs. The Dreamville rapper prides himself on his lyrical ability and pays close attention to detail in his lyrics. Part of that precision is why he hasn’t released an album in four years, with The Fall Off potentially being his final project.
The closest Cole has come to recording a collaborative album was with Kendrick Lamar during their career’s early days. They recorded multiple songs together, including the released ‘Temptation’ and ‘Shock the World’, but they blew up so fast that the whole project never saw the light of day.
However, Cole attempted to record a joint album with another rapper in the late 2010s. According to The Roots’ own Black Thought, one of the most talented lyricists of all time, Cole reached out to him in 2018 with an idea to make a whole project together.
“I don’t know the brother well, but he and I had talked about doing music together at one point,” he told This Week in White Supremacy. “At the beginning of 2018, he hit me like, ‘Yo, let’s do an album.’ I told him to send me some music. I told him I was with it. It wasn’t, ‘Send me some music to see if I want to do it’; it was like, ‘Let me see what you’re thinking.’”
Thought explained that Cole wanted to create music similar to The Roots, but unfortunately, he was on a different wavelength. “He sent me a batch of beats and they all just felt so close to something Roots-centric,” he said. “At the time, I was trying to sort of step outside of what I’d done with The Roots, and I just didn’t feel like we were lining up.
“So I asked him to do a different batch, I gave him an explanation, and in my explanation I think I scared him off. Maybe some of the trigger words that I was using, like, ‘I want something hard. This beat ain’t aggressive enough.’ He wasn’t on that. He was on a peaceful journey.”
Thought is also an adjunct instructor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. When students asked for his thoughts on Cole apologising to Kendrick for dissing him on ‘7 Minute Drill’, he had high praise.
“Some of my students at NYU asked me a week ago asked me how I feel about J Cole’s apology to Kendrick a day or so after putting out a diss record,” he recalled. “Though I hadn’t heard any of the music, I thought it was a beautiful thing. I thought, ‘That’s what’s unprecedented.’
“What we’ve yet to see is somebody nip that in the bud, right? That’s what I felt like he was in effect doing. I felt like it just showed humility, nobility and a sense of elevation that you don’t see too often across the board.”
He added, “When the plane’s going down, you gotta situate your own oxygen mask first. He’s been on a trajectory of just that, self-revelation, and investing in himself. His mind, spirit, body, soul, music, everything is better for it.”