The album J Cole used to compete with Kanye West

J Cole is one in all Kanye West’s largest followers, however that didn’t cease him from desirous to go head-to-head with the G.O.O.D. Music boss. In 2013, when Cole caught wind of Ye releasing Yeezus across the identical time as Born Sinner, he made it his mission to compete with him reasonably than shying away from the problem.

“Instantly the lightbulb [turned on]… it got real,” he instructed Billboard. “I made one phone call to somebody that would know, just to make sure first. As soon as I got it confirmed, I was like, ‘Yo…’ The idea hit me instantly: ‘You got to go to that date.’”

He continued, “I’m not going to sit [here]… I worked too hard to come a week later after Kanye West drops an amazing album. It’d be like, ‘Oh and J. Cole dropped too, a week later.’ Nah. I’m going to go see him on that date. He’s the greatest. So it’s like, I’m a competitor by nature, so it was instant. It wasn’t even a thought. It’s a definite statement about how I feel about my album, which is confident.”

Born Sinner ended up debuting at quantity two on the Billboard 200 chart with 297,000 items, but it surely was solely 30,000 lower than Yeezus, which offered 327,000. Regardless of arising brief, the closeness of the 2 albums served as a testomony to Cole’s confidence as an artist.

A self-proclaimed fan of Kanye West, Cole had goals of working with the Chicago rapper on a complete undertaking. Though the pair collaborated on ‘Looking for Trouble’ as a part of the G.O.O.D. Fridays sequence in 2010, Cole wished to take issues even additional.

“With people like that, I just like to earn my own way, earn my keep kind of,” he instructed Vulture. “I would love to work with him on a major scale. Not just a song here or a song there — I would love to do something extraordinary with him, but I feel like I gotta step my game up and kind of earn my spot before I can worry about that.”

Cole as soon as called The College Dropout a “life-changing” album for him whereas reflecting on being totally conscious of Kanye West for the primary time when the music video for ‘Through the Wire’ was launched. It was an vital second for Cole, crediting it because the time his dependancy to music first started.

“This shit was a life-changing album for me,” he stated. “The first time I heard Kanye rap was on ‘Champions’, but the first time I saw him and figured out who he was was when the ‘Through the Wire’ video came out. That was the summer before I went to school, in June of 2002. From that moment, I was like, ‘This n-gga is the truth.’ I was instantly addicted to the music.”

Cole added, “I went and got everything that was unreleased at that time. I was riding with him, to the point that when I got to school that semester in New York, luckily he had a show at S.O.B.’s. and I went. It was a legendary show. His album didn’t come out until like seven months after that, so it was early. That album is all of my memories of my freshman year of college.”

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