The Jay-Z song from 2001 that J Cole can’t stand
Before Jay-Z signed J Cole to Roc Nation in 2009, he served another role entirely for the young man. Jay wasn’t Cole’s boss yet, but he was certainly one of his idols.
As Cole has spoken publicly about in interviews, he was hugely influenced by Jay-Z as a kid — and he especially loved his 2001 album The Blueprint. That must have made it all the more special when, eight years later, Cole was invited to feature on its sequel, The Blueprint 3, rapping on the track ‘A Star is Born.’
Cole had loved the first Blueprint album so much that appearing on its sequel had surely meant a lot, especially when considering how early into his career he was. This feature so viscerally represented the fact that he was making it as a rapper.
But for all of Cole’s youthful admiration for Jay-Z and The Blueprint, there was always one song on that album that he couldn’t get on board with. He even tended to skip it.
Cole was young when he bought The Blueprint, and, as he explained to Complex in 2011, he listened to it “to death, front to back.” His mother used to drive him around in her car, and he played it religiously during those drives.
Except, it wasn’t quite true that he listened to it from front to back. There was one song he couldn’t stand to listen to every time. “I only skipped one song,” he admitted, “which was ‘Jigga That N*gga,’ but even that I used to play.”
He wouldn’t listen to the song each and every time, but he still heard it enough to learn the lyrics off by heart. He may not have liked it very much, but he nonetheless recognised that it’s still “a classic, hands down.”
‘Jigga That N*gga,’ despite being one of the signature songs from The Blueprint, is a bit of an odd one out. It was one of only a small number of tracks on the album not to bear a touch of soul music in it, and, as its producers Poke and Tone revealed to Complex in 2012, the beat wasn’t actually created with Jay-Z in mind.
The track was initially meant to be used by MC Lyte, but the producers decided that it suited Jay-Z’s sensibility more. Lots of people love the finished song featuring Jay’s vocals, but it was certainly created a bit outside of the context of the rest of The Blueprint. Perhaps that’s part of why the young Cole found it so difficult to listen to?