The sixth episode of J. Cole’s Inevitable series dropped earlier tonight and in this one, he recaps the the time from just after the release of Friday Night Lights to the release of his debut album, Cole World: The Sideline Story.
In the episode, Cole and Ib told a particularly interesting, never-before-heard story from JAY Z and LeBron James’ Two Kings dinner at All Star Weekend in 2011. The context is that J. Cole is in need of a single for his album to come out and has had failed attempts with ‘Blow Up’, ‘Higher’ and a bunch of other songs.
Cole’s manager Ib told the story. “We having a conversation. Me, Cole, Drake, Future (The Prince). I don’t know who else but there were a couple more people. So then JAY walks in and he sees all of us together. He goes “yo!” and he looks at Drake and he says “yo, give the boy one”, points at Cole like basically ‘give him a hit’. We’re all like ‘what?’. I even remember Future’s face being like, that’s embarrassing.”
Cole clarified “he’s looking at Drake and pointing at me and going ‘give him a hit, give my boy a hit’ basically.” They contextualised it by pointing out that despite being friends, it was at the height of the competitive time for Cole and Drake. They also had just released a song together three months prior in ‘In The Morning’.
According to Ib, Cole wasn’t happy about it. “What I do remember is being at the dinner after that and I’m just looking at Cole and he looks pissed.” The Fayetteville rapper ended up confronting JAY Z later that night about the hypocrisy of pressuring him for a big single when that wasn’t the case for him on Reasonable Doubt.
Of course, he eventually made ‘Work Out’ and put out his debut album later that year to great commercial success, but it’s very interesting to hear about stories from the time that we never knew.
You can check out the audio series here. In other news, Cole is putting out two new versions of 2014 Forest Hills Drive with a total of 8 bonus tracks.
