Fat Joe gave a biting assessment on J. Cole during the Tuesday (January 20) episode of podcast Joe and Jada.
On February 6, the two-time Grammy winner will release his long-awaited seventh album, The Fall-Off, which has had hip-hop fans buzzing online since its announcement earlier this month. But during the latest episode of Joe and Jada, Joey Crack questioned whether Cole World will have a strong reception in comparison to his previous albums.
The Bronx native challenged whether J. Cole was still a part of rap's "Big Three" along with Drake and Kendrick Lamar, after Cole apologized for and removed from streaming his Kendrick diss "7 Minute Drill." Cole's song was a response to Kendrick's "Like That," which took aim at both the N.C. rapper and Drake.
Around the four-minute mark of the podcast, co-host Jadakiss said that Cole has a project on the way — separate from his upcoming LP — where he raps over several beats from Kiss' group The L.O.X. Jada said that Cole is "coming back in a major way."
"Do we look at him the same, being that they screwed his head off the big three?" Joe asked, in reference to the negative public response to Cole opting out of a battle with Kendrick.
After Jadakiss added that he didn't "like the terminology," Fat Joe denied that he was basing his assessment of Cole on social media. Rather, Joe said, it's true to the spirit of hip-hop to battle, no matter the odds. As an example, he pointed to his co-host's own vicious broadsides against an at-his-commercial-peak 50 Cent in the mid-aughts.
"I'm talking about hip-hop, right? So, what I'm saying to you is, you guys were fuckin' miniature compared to [50 Cent]. 50 Cent just sold 30 million records. You went atom, you went to the yard with the swarm," Joe said.
But Jada argued that Cole could sell "100 million," and that whatever happened with Kendrick no longer had any effect on his opinion of the KOD rapper's merits.
"The bars and the power of the people in the street made all of that shit irrelevant," the emcee said.
"He didn't come outside, Jada," Joe retorted. Kiss responded by implying the reasons for Cole's battle moves would be explained on his new album.
"It's all in the music," Jada said.