J. Cole has confirmed rumors that Drake and Kendrick Lamar were supposed to appear on The Fall-Off.
During a lengthy interview with Cam’ron (which puts to bed their bizarre legal battle), the Dreamville founder explained that both Dot and Drizzy were orginally featured on his latest album until their 2024 rap battle, as well as a leak of his project, forced him to take them off the tracklist.
“[Kendrick] was on two joints,” he revealed, certifying a claim made last year by podcaster Mal that the pgLang star and OVO hitmaker each had multiple appearances on an early version of The Fall-Off.
Cole added: “That was a part of my vision for it, having both of these dudes as a part of this. On my way out, I wanted to celebrate like, ‘Damn, I’m really grateful to have done it at the same time as these n*ggas.’”
The North Carolina native also revealed that he had mixed feelings about Kendrick’s verse on Future and Metro Boomin‘s “Like That” — the song that ignited Kendrick and Drake’s long-simmering beef — as it inadvertently sabotaged the rollout for The Fall-Off, which Cole was planning to release shortly after his Might Delete Later mixtape.
“I had two reactions,” he shared. “My first reaction is: that shit is hard. It’s a hard-ass verse, undeniably. The beat is crazy, the song is ill and I’m like, ‘That shit is tough.’ My second reaction is: not now, n*gga! This is inconvenient for me.”
J. Cole went on to explain that he only recorded his (since-deleted) Kendrick diss song “7 Minute Drill” because he felt pressurized to respond to “Like That” before putting out The Fall-Off.
“My phone was blowing up immediately like, ‘Please, press the button!’ That’s the energy from n*ggas that love me,” he recalled. “In reality, do I actually feel any sort of [disrespect]. There wasn’t any disrespect in [Kendrick’s verse]! I didn’t listen to that and be like, ‘Damn, n*gga said what?’
“My feeling was, ‘Fuck!’ Because now I know this [album] that I’ve been working on for eight years, plus this other [mixtape] that I did as a set-up, n*ggas ain’t gonna never let me put that out until I address this.”
Reflecting on “7 Minute Drill,” Cole admitted that he had no ill towards Kendrick when writing the track and simply saw it as friendly sparring.
“There was no malice in my heart. There wasn’t even a desire to be like, ‘Ooh, this n*gga gave me a chance to come demolish him!’” he said. “I love this n*gga … but I’m worried about what the world is gonna say.
“Which is embarassing to say out loud, but it’s true. Because I’m fearful that this thing that I’ve been working on for so long is gonna go unappreciated if I don’t [respond].
“So I’m like, ‘Let me say just enough to where it looks like I said something.’ Everything I’m saying, I know and he knows, it’s all survivable. I’m not hitting him with no fatal blows.”
As his well-documented apology at Dreamville Fest showed, however, Cole instantly regretted the move.
“The second it comes out, I’m like, ‘Oh, you created a dividing line where you’re forcing the world to pick a side … and to slander [Kendrick]. And they’re taking some of the shit you said and they giving it gas.’ And then my thought becomes, ‘I fucked up. I’ve misrepresented myself,’” he admitted.
The 41-year-old added that his heart was “heavy” when he reflected on the damage that he might have done to his friendship with Kendrick, motivating him to distance himself from “7 Minute Drill” and publicly apologize to his “Forbidden Fruit” collaborator.
“The [idea] came to me an hour before, and I really feel like this was God because of how it lifted me and took the weight off me,” he said. “I didn’t give a fuck [about the immediate backlash] because I knew in my heart what I did wad right for me.”
