Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Top Dog Entertainment President Punch is letting Questlove know that his critique of Kendrick Lamar amid the height of the Drake beef did not go unnoticed.
Kendrick’s new video “squabble up” pays homage to various aspects of California culture from the Bay to LA., while also sprinkling in nods to several iconic album covers and music videos. Among the latter is a tribute to The Roots‘ 1999 music video for “The Next Movement,” which sparked a response from Quest on Instagram.
“I wanna thank Kendrick Lamar for acknowledging something I thought no one saw or cared about,” he wrote.
Back in May, however, Questlove sternly criticized both Kendrick and Drake for their rap battle.
“Nobody won the war,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “This wasn’t about skill. This was a wrestling match level mudslinging and takedown by any means necessary — women & children (& actual facts) be damned.
“Same audience wanting blood will soon put up ‘rip’ posts like they weren’t part of the problem. Hip Hop truly is dead.”
Challenging both Kendrick and Drake to step their game up, morally speaking, he added in the caption: “Here We Are Now…Entertain us?”
While this was more of a critique and less of a diss, Punch still took note of the “hating,” as he acknowledged on X on Tuesday (November 26).
Retweeting a post about Quest thanking Kendrick for the homage, an X user named Monie wrote, “Mind you, he was one of them n-ggas hating. Lol.”
Someone else replied to her, “Wasn’t Issac Hayes son hating too during the beef?” Hayes is also represented in the “squabble up” video.
“Boff of’em. We seen them,” Punch replied.
Apparently peeping the critiques didn’t stop Kendrick Lamar from paying homage – which seemingly lit a fire under The Roots to finish their long-awaited new album.
Alongside a screenshot of a viral tweet highlighting the similarities between “squabble up” and “The Next Movement,” Questlove wrote on Instagram: “Damn now we GOTTA FINISH THIS LP huh? We back BABY!”
Quest followed up with a separate Instagram post thanking Kendrick and further confirming that a new Roots project is happening.
Over the last decade, The Roots have been busy with their gig as the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, while Black Thought has released several solo projects and a memoir, and Questlove has directed an Oscar-winning documentary and written several books.
However, Quest did recently reveal that the group are still working on their long-awaited 15th album and credited Common and Pete Rock‘s The Auditorium Vol. 1 with inspiring them to complete the project.
Speaking on his Questlove Supreme podcast, the 53-year-old said: “Not to be outdone, my band has been sitting on the sidelines watching all this action happening and, you know, it’s made us… I will say that it’s made Tariq [Black Thought] into — the muthafucka wrote seven songs in one day! We have not done that since our second album.”
The Philadelphia native then offered an update on the album’s long-awaited release, saying: “I know the exact date when I want to release it, and it’s not 2024. But it’s a very seminal 2025 date that will make sense once it comes out.”
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J. Cole has revealed that he was taking direct shots at Kanye West on “Looking For Trouble” in response to what he felt was a disrespectful remark.
During the latest episode of his Inevitable audio series, the Dreamville rapper spoke about the making of their 2010 G.O.O.D. Fridays collaboration and the tension (which may well have been one-sided) leading up to it.
Cole began by recalling Kanye hosting a UStream before the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and being asked by a viewer if he had any plans to work with the then-rising Roc Nation signee.
Cole’s initial excitement at realizing Ye — one of his favorite artists at the time — knew who he was was soon dampened by his answer, though.
“Kanye’s answer was, like — I don’t think anybody watching it would notice, but me being me, I looked at him like, ‘Aw, that shit was hella dismissive,'” he said.
“He said, ‘I mean, we might put him on one of the G.O.O.D. Fridays or something.’ It was like a, ‘Yes, but.’ He’s not a n-gga that I would [feature on my album] […] If he would’ve been like, ‘Yeah, it would be fire to put him on a G.O.O.D. Friday [song]’ it would have been a different feeling.”
Shortly afterwards, Kanye West phoned J. Cole and asked him to record a verse for his now-legendary G.O.O.D. Fridays series, but Cole, who was on tour in Michigan at the time, initially declined due to time constraints.
“I’m genuinely like, ‘Damn, bro, I appreciate it. But yo, I’m on this tour. I can’t. I’m in fucking Michigan and I’m not gonna be able to make it,'” he remembered. “Mind you, it was due Friday and this is Wednesday afternoon.
“[Kanye] was like, ‘I asked such and such and they make it happen.’ It was a polite flex of like, ‘I think you can make this happen.’ It made me be like, ‘Alright, yeah, how can I make it happen?'”
Cole said he drove roughly two hours to a studio in Detroit to record his verse, writing his rhymes on the journey.
“Mind you, I didn’t have nobody’s verse. The n-gga just sent me the beat. I didn’t know what the fuck the song was!” he added.
The Off-Season MC then broke down his “Looking For Trouble” verse and confirmed that he was jabbing Kanye on the song for his “dismissive” UStream comments.
“‘Cole World, make way for the chosen one / What you now hear is puttin’ fear in all the older ones / Downplayed me to downgrade me like they don’t notice him / Your shoes too big to fill? I can barely squeeze my toes in ‘em,’” he said, reciting his opening bars.
“The world has never known that. Those were direct shots [at Kanye] because days prior I had seen the n-gga be like, ‘Ah, we might put him on a G.O.O.D. Friday song or something.’ […] And those are shots I know only [Kanye] would feel.”
After Cole sent his verse back, Ye responded enthusiastically. Cole’s longtime manager Ibrahim “Ib” Hamad remembered the Chicago rap legend messaging them: “Yo, you killed it! I had to throw a couple bars on there so we could have that moment.”
“Which was love!” Cole acknowledged, adding that Kanye originally only had four bars on “Looking For Trouble.”
After hearing the final version of the song, however, Cole’s sourness towards his Hip Hop hero crept back in. He felt that his verse was “sabotaged” during the mixing process due to his vocals being “nudged” off beat.
“I felt like it was on some lowkey spiteful shit, but I could be completely misinterpreting it. But what definitely happened was — and I was pissed — these n-ggas nudged my vocals,” he explained. “The only reason I didn’t flip is because the verse was well received. This verse was a moment.”
He added: “It’s not wild offbeat, but when you nudge it, it’s slight. It just makes you sound either early or late. It made my flow sound stiff. When I hear this verse, this is not how I recorded it. I recorded it loose, free, but they nudged it and made my shit sound too perfect and stiff.”
Cole acknowledged that it may have been a producer or engineer, not necessarily Kanye, “but in the context of everything, I was already on some shit like, ‘Yo, this is some weird shit going on.’ I felt it was on some sabotage shit.”
J. Cole and Kanye West have yet to work together since “Looking For Trouble” and their relationship has remained complicated.
Cole famously dissed Ye on the 2016 song “False Prophets” and appeared to throw more shots at him on his 2019 hit “Middle Child.”
Kanye later demanded a “public apology” from the North Carolina native, alluding to his lyrical darts.
The G.O.O.D. Music founder then went on the offense earlier this year, dissing Cole on his remix of Future, Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That” while also disparaging the Dreamville boss for backing out of his battle with Kendrick.
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