Black Thought is one of the most feared rappers alive (ask JAY-Z), but he doesn’t always need the power of his pen to scare off fellow MCs.
During an appearance on the This Week in White Supremacy podcast, The Roots lyricist revealed that J. Cole once reached out to him about doing a joint album together, but Thought’s answer inadvertently caused the Dreamville rap star to back away.
“I don’t know the brother well, but he and I had talked about doing music together at one point. At the beginning of 2018, he hit me like, ‘Yo, let’s do an album,’” he recalled.
“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.’
He continued: “He sent me a batch of beats and they all just felt so close to something Roots-centric. 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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Black Thought praised J. Cole for apologizing to Kendrick Lamar for dissing him on “7 Minute Drill.”
While many in Hip Hop have criticized the North Carolina native for backing out of the “Big Three” battle — including fellow Hip Hop figures like 50 Cent, Suge Knight and Styles P — Thought called the gesture “beautiful.”
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“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 said. “Though I hadn’t heard any of the music, I thought it was a beautiful thing. That was what was unprecedented.
“What we’ve seen, time and time again since the ’80s, are MCs going back and forth, like battling out. Sometimes they keep it to the record, sometimes it gets physical and it gets crazy.”
He continued: “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. It just showed humility, nobility and a sense of elevation that you don’t see too often across the board.
“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.”
