Even though it’s been over five months since current rap icons Kendrick Lamar and Drake went head to head in one of the craziest rap beefs of this generation, the impact is still reverberating through the hip-hop and rap communities. Kendrick Lamar has been releasing new diss tracks as recent as last month, and with his Super Bowl halftime performance on the horizon, who knows what else is in store with this situation?
What someone with only the surface-level facts may not know, however, is that the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar technically began because of a fellow wildly popular rapper, J. Cole. See, he was a featured artist on Drake’s song, “First Person Shooter,” where he claimed that Drake, Kendrick Lamar and himself were the “big three” of rap. Kendrick Lamar fought back against this claim on Future’s track “Like That,” which both J. Cole and Drake took offense to. J. Cole released the single, “7 Minute Drill” as a callout to K.Dot, then soon after took the song off streaming and publicly apologized, which is largely considered a good call after what promptly happened to Drake and his public image.
Since then, J. Cole has kept quiet about the situation, refusing to weigh in when the beef was all anybody could talk about. Now that things have died down a bit, J. Cole has finally come to give his two cents in the form of “Port Antonio,” a track released on YouTube rather than any major music streaming platforms.
The song never refers to Kendrick Lamar by name, yet anyone with any context of the situation can pretty easily guess what he’s referring to in the track’s latter half. He expands, first and foremost, on why he thought it was best not to engage with the growing feud, stating eloquently that, “I wouldn’t have lost the battle, dawg, I would’ve lost the bro / I would’ve gained a foe,” which ultimately speaks to why J. Cole’s opinion is so important to this situation.
Unlike many of the artists that gave their judgment as outside observers, J. Cole was a close collaborator with both Kendrick Lamar and Drake and considered them both his friends. It would’ve been easy for him to take the easy route and side with Kendrick Lamar like everyone else was doing, but to do that, he’d have to turn his back on someone that he clearly cares for. So, in this song, he makes the brave choice to give Drake his support with the lines, “To start another war: hey, Drake, you’ll always be my n**** / I ain’t ashamed to say you did a lot for me, my n****.” As pointed out by Pitchfork, the song also uses a sample from Cleo Sol’s “Know That You Are Loved,” which could be another way for J. Cole to sneakily support Drake when no one else will.