We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

J. Cole has come out of the whole Drake/Kendrick Lamar situation surprisingly intact. Shortly after Kendrick took shots at both Drake and Cole on Future’s “Like That,” Cole responded with “7 Minute Drill,” a diss track on his surprise mixtape Might Delete Later. Two days after that, true to the tape’s title, Cole went onstage at his own Dreamville festival to apologize for the song and to say how much he loved Kendrick. He also removed “7 Minute Drill” from streaming services. This seemed like clown behavior at the time, but the feud quickly got very nasty and personal, and Cole’s decision to recuse himself was probably the right one. Now, if everyone doesn’t mind, he would like to get back to rapping about having sex.

Drake doesn’t sound like he’s having fun anymore. In a different world, Aubrey Drake Graham might come off as Keyser Söze on “The Heart Part 6,” the most recent volley (at least for now) in the extremely busy, extremely fun Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud. “The Heart Part 6” is the song where Drake says that he planted a fake story about having a secret 11-year-old daughter and says that Kendrick’s “Meet The Grahams” cover art was a setup, a way to reel Kendrick in. But Drake doesn’t sound like the master manipulator that he claims to be. Instead, he’s beat-up, surly, tired. “The Heart Part 6” is a Band-Aid, a chance for any remaining Drake partisans to claim that he’s really the winner of this past week’s events. We know better.

It’s been a dramatic few days in the rap-feud trenches. Right now, the whole rap world still roiling in the aftermath of Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” the song where Kendrick Lamar came in swinging at his peers Drake and J. Cole. “Like That” still sits at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after debuting there last week. Last week, J. Cole responded with his Kendrick diss track “7 Minute Drill.” Then, playing his own Dreamville Festival on Sunday, Cole retracted and apologized for that song, saying it was the goofiest thing he’d ever done. (“7 Minute Drill,” which was on its way to being a hit, is now gone from streaming services.) Cole is attempting to opt out of this story, but nobody else is. This weekend saw a flurry of diss tracks, with Drake taking on many of his past collaborators.

Last month, longtime collaborators Future and Metro Boomin announced plans to release two collaborative albums, pretty much back-to-back. We Don’t Trust You, the first of those albums, arrived three weeks ago, and it immediately became a huge deal, largely thanks to the “Like That” verse where a furious Kendrick Lamar went off on his supposed peers Drake and J. Cole. “Like That” debuted at #1 and served as a seismic rap event, the kind of thing that can shape an entire year’s worth of narratives. Last week, Cole responded with a Kendrick diss track, which he apologetically retracted two days later. Now, Future and Metro Boomin’s second collaborative album has arrived.

Typically speaking, college kids aren’t seasoned marketers or astute culture journalists. They don’t use Chartmetric to assess the career trajectory of their favorite rapper, and when they describe what does or doesn’t work for their faves, they aren’t trying to win a Pulitzer Prize. And unlike me, they’ll probably never have the ability to do so anyway (JK, JK). But what they do have is the benefit of unfiltered instinct, and if you hang around them for long enough, you can get the sort of raw, plainspoken insight that’s seldom gleaned from a boardroom or an editorial meeting.

On Friday, J. Cole released the surprise mixtape Might Delete Later, and he ended the release by dissing his longtime peer Kendrick Lamar. Two weeks earlier, Kendrick took shots at both Cole and his “First Person Shooter” collaborator Drake on Future and Metro Boomin’s song “Like That,” igniting a long-simmering rap cold war and erupting into the cultural conversation. Right now, “Like That” is the #1 song in America. “7 Minute Drill,” Cole’s response song, was tepid and oddly reverent to Kendrick, and it drew mixed reactions, but it’s still a big song and a bigger story. (On the Apple Music streaming chart today, “7 Minute Drill” sits at #2, behind only “Like That.”) Now, Cole says that he’s embarrassed for releasing the song.

Kendrick Lamar sent the rap world aflutter last month with a guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” lashing out at Drake and J. Cole. In the verse, K.Dot responded to Drake and Cole’s For All The Dogs track “First Person Shooter,” a #1 hit in which Cole rapped about the three stars’ vaunted place in the hip-hop hierarchy: “Love when they argue the hardest MC/ Is it K. Dot, is it Aubrey, or me?/ We the big three like we started a league.” On “Like That,” among other insults, Kendrick replied, “Motherfuck the big three, n***a, it’s just big me!”

Kendrick Lamar is not into these “big three” conversations. For the past few years, rap top-dog conversations have revolved around three names: Kendrick, Drake, and J. Cole. Kendrick and Drake have been taking shots at one another for more than a decade, but Kendrick has never been known to have any problem with Cole until this morning. Now, however, Drake and Cole have a couple of collaborations, and they’re on tour together. Kendrick is not into it, and he’s letting it be known.

Nicki Minaj released Queen, her last album, way the hell back in summer 2018. When it came out, Nicki was upset that Travis Scott’s Astroworld kept her out of the #1 spot; that’s how long ago that was. In the five years since then, Nicki has appeared on three #1 pop hits, including “Super Freaky Girl,” her first-ever solo chart-topper. Now, finally, Nicki has released her long-promised album Pink Friday 2. It’s definitely being positioned as a major release.

Drake released his new album For All The Dogs last month, and after saying that he planned to take time off to deal with health issues, he’s already back with new music. Yesterday, Drake announced plans to release his third Scary Hours EP. The new music is here today, but it’s not packaged as an EP. Instead, it’s out in the world as a new edition of For All The Dogs, with six extra tracks attached. Perhaps the world didn’t need six new Drake songs immediately after the 23-track album came out, but there’s some important context here: Drake is rapping on these things.

On the morning that Drake released his new album For All The Dogs last month, the artist went on his SiriusXM satellite radio show and told his audience that he was “having the craziest problems for years with my stomach” and that he planned to step away from rap “for maybe a year or so.” That is not happening. Earlier this week, Drake announced a 2024 arena tour with J. Cole. Now, Drake says that his third Scary Hours release is coming out tonight, at midnight.

Last year, Drake headed out on his It’s All A Blur tour, hitting a ton of arenas with his frequent collaborator 21 Savage. When that tour came to Montreal, Savage, still dealing with immigration issues that have since been resolved, could not appear, and J. Cole took his place. That was part of a growing partnership between Drake and Cole, two of the biggest rappers on the planet. Today, Drake has announced a second iteration of the It’s All A Blur tour. This time, it’ll be Drake and Cole hitting all those arenas together.

Drake’s For All The Dogs track “First Person Shooter” debuted on top of the Billboard Hot 100 this week, which means that Drake is now tied with Michael Jackson for the most #1 hits by a male solo artist on the chart.

Say what you want about Drake’s choice of cover art, but the man knows how to get our attention. Remember the beautifully cringe pregnant emoji brigade from Certified Lover Boy? The extreme closeup of Suki Baby on Her Loss? Those images honestly stuck with me way more than any of the music on those albums. And now we get another memorable cover courtesy of Drake’s son, Adonis, who scribbled a cool and slightly menacing ghostlike canine creature for the front of Drake’s album For All The Dogs.

Earlier this year, Lil Yachty took a sharp turn into psych-rock with his album Let’s Start Here. Since then, though, Yachty has been back on his rap shit. Just in the past few weeks, Yachty has released tracks with JID and Despot. Now, he’s joined forces with J. Cole, an old adversary, to rip an Alchemist bit to pieces.

As far as anyone knows, Gucci Mane has not yet succeeded in his quest to sign Oliver Anthony, the “Rich Men North Of Richmond” guy, to his 1017 Records label. If Oliver Anthony does show up with a 1017 chain on, then we’ll truly know that we’re living in the simulation. Until then, Gucci seems to be doing just fine for himself. He’s got a new album called Breath Of Fresh Air on the way, and he’s got a new song with J. Cole out today.

Drake is currently on his first headlining North American tour since 2018. The oft-delayed It’s All A Blur tour is ostensibly a co-headlining trek with 21 Savage to promote their 2022 collaborative album Her Loss. Last night, the tour hit Montreal’s Bell Centre minus 21 Savage, but Drake did bring out longtime friend and collaborator J. Cole. Wearing a yellow shirt reading “The game has changed, you have been warned,” J. Cole performed 2014’s “No Role Modelz” with Drake plus some solo tracks, including 2019’s “Middle Child,” 2014’s “Wet Dreamz,” 2013’s “Power Trip,” and 21 Savage’s “a lot.” Watch some fan-shot footage below.

The charts have been lacking something lately. A certain pizzazz? The spark of excitement that accompanies big-tent pop music at its best? As we reach the midpoint of 2023, it’s hard to remember a time when mainstream pop has been so bereft of zeitgeist-seizing giddiness — certainly not during the hottest months of the year, when big-name stars traditionally vie for Song Of The Summer status.

Michael Jordan has been the primary owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets for 13 years, but today he’s sold his majority share in the team to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall. As Consequence points out, that group also includes J. Cole and Eric Church, two North Carolina music superstars who double as basketball obsessives.

Baton Rouge rapper YoungBoy NeverBrokeAgain — known as NBA YoungBoy to hip-hop fans in the know — doesn’t usually enjoy speaking to other human beings. As he told the writer Meaghan Garvey in Billboard, “I’m not big on people.” YoungBoy’s a quiet soul — deeply intense and deeply sensitive — with an unfiltered abundance of demons and an exacting gift for primitively sharing those demons in his music.

Over the past few years, the Atlanta singer Summer Walker has emerged as one of the biggest, most impressive stars on the R&B landscape. Records like Walker’s 2021 album Still Over It feature big stars and fit the sound of the moment, but Walker still uses them to get raw and vulnerable about her personal life. On her new EP, though, Walker goes in a different direction, finding a more languid and vaporous sound.

Lil Durk and J. Cole are both big rap stars, but they aren’t the most obvious emcees to pair up on a track. So it’s interesting to hear them aligned on “All My Life,” a single from Durk’s upcoming album Almost Healed. The song is firmly entrenched in hip-hop’s inspirational ballad subgenre, built around a chorale of children singing, “All my life, they’ve been trying to keep me down/ All this time, never thought I would make it out.” It almost sounds like an interpolation of the K-Ci & JoJo song, but not quite. Watch director Steve Cannon’s video for “All My Life” below.

Usher headlined J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival in Raleigh on Saturday night, aka April 1, and he played an April Fools’ Day prank on his audience during his set. Taking the mic, he teased: “I said I would have a special surprise for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen. You guys wanna know what that surprise is?” And after a pause: “Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, put your hands together for the one, the only, Beyoncé!” Usher waited and pretended to check in with someone at the side of the stage, then came back to the microphone and said: “April Fools.” See below:

When the South Korean juggernaut BTS first formed, the idea was for them to be less of a K-pop idol group and more of a straight-up hop-hop group. That changed over time, but BTS member J-Hope, chosen more as a dancer than a rapper, has always been shouting out J. Cole on record since the very early days of BTS. Today, he’s on a new song with Cole.

J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival will return very soon. The fest will take place at Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Park on April 1 and 2 — so, like, a month from now — and its newly revealed lineup is enticing. Usher will headline Saturday, while Cole is doing a special co-headlining set with Drake to close things out on Sunday. Also on deck: Lil Durk, Ari Lennox, Burna Boy, Summer Walker, City Girls, Sean Paul, J.I.D, GloRilla, Waka Flocka Flame(!), EARTHGANG, Key Glock, Jessie Reyez, Mario, Baby Tate, and more. Check out the full lineup below and get tickets here.

A year ago we bemoaned Cordae’s descent into prestige-rap faux-profundity, but today he’s showing us how much fun a classicist approach to hip-hop can be. “Two Tens,” Cordae’s new single, is produced by J. Cole, a guy who can fall prey to some of the same self-serious tendencies that drag Cordae down. It finds the former YBN affiliate trading bars with Anderson .Paak over a smoky, jazzy, metropolitan loop like they’re Tip and Phife or something. It’s way more entertaining than I expected. Check it out below.

Last we heard from J. Cole, we got the rapper’s Gangsta Grillz mixtape, released in April 2022. Cole also guested on a bunch of singles, including Smino’s “90 Proof,” BIA’s “LONDON,” YG and Moneybagg Yo’s “Scared Money,” and Benny The Butcher’s “Johnny P’s Caddy.” Well, tonight J. Cole and producer Bvtman have shared a brand-new track called “Procrastination (Broke).” The new cut comes more than a year after Cole dropped his 2021 LP The Off-Season.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the hugely talented Chicago-via-St. Louis rapper Smino, who’s been busy on the guest-rapper circuit but who hasn’t released a record of his own since the 2020 mixtape She Already Decided. Right now, though, Smino is working on a new album called Luv 4 Rent, and he’s just released a new single that features a big star.

J. Cole, an extremely famous rapper who will headline Bonnaroo next month, wants to be a basketball player so bad. Last year, the same week that he released his album The Off-Season, Cole went to play for the Rwanda Patriots in the Africa Basketball League, a thing that many of us had never heard of before Cole went to play for them. Cole who played high school basketball and redshirted at St. John’s University, though he never played for that team. In his first game in Rwanda, Cole scored all of three points. In a grand total of 45 minutes of play during the short season, Cole racked up five points, three assists, and five rebounds. It was not a terribly successful experiment. But now Cole is coming back to give professional hooping another shot.

Sometimes I feel like I’m missing a pop cultural chip because I never had the Disney Channel growing up. One time, many years ago, I was interviewing for a pretty high-profile job at a major pop-music website. I wanted that job so badly that for the edit test I 100% researched and faked a lifetime’s worth of knowledge about Demi Lovato, who I had never seen on Camp Rock or Sonny With A Chance, just like I had never seen Miley Cyrus on Hannah Montana or Selena Gomez on Wizards Of Waverly Place. (I ended up getting the job, so my 24-hour crash course paid off in the end.) This is all to say that I still have a note of being out of my depth any time I go to discuss a Disney or former Disney star crossing over into the mainstream conversation, simply due to the contextual history I grew up not having.

“Europeans decided what Blackness was.” That’s something that billy woods told The FADER in maybe the only interview that woods has done behind his new album Aethiopes. In the context of the interview, that’s less a thesis statement and more a tossed-off observation, but it’s still a useful way for looking into Aethiopes, one more stunning piece of rap music from a career full of them. Over the course of his career, billy woods has found hundreds of sidelong, oblique ways to look at a bloodthirsty, hostile reality. His music is full of apocalyptic imagery, late-capitalist inhumanity, and visceral reminders from centuries upon centuries of white colonialism. Aethiopes, an album named after an archaic European term for Africans, digs deep into the many ways that history informs the way people live their lives in the here-and-now, and it’s rich and layered enough to leave your head spinning.

In one of the quieter moments on J. Cole’s new Dreamville mixtape D-Day, DJ Drama chimes in with a little self-aggrandizing commentary. This is nothing new. For decades, Drama has been filling up the pauses on mixtapes by bellowing about his own greatness. He’s very good at it, and he’s established catchphrases — “and like that, we gone!” — that trigger pavlovian endorphin-floods in rap dorks of a certain age. In this one moment, though, Drama is actually a little too humble: “Every time you hear my voice, I’m thinkin’ Mount Rushmore! And there’s only a couple spots available!” I don’t know what Mount Rushmore Drama is talking about here, but if he’s talking about the Mount Rushmore of mixtape DJs, then Drama’s spot is safe. The mixtape-DJ Mount Rushmore might just be DJ Drama’s face four times.

Last year, Tyler, The Creator released his album Call Me If You Got Lost, and he figured out a smart way to evoke a particular kind of ’00s rap-mixtape nostalgia: He brought in DJ Drama. Drama, whose Gangsta Grillz mixtape series was required listening for everyone who loved rap music in that crucial mixtape era, talked his shit all over Call Me If You Got Lost, and his booming declarations really gave that album a feeling. Today, J. Cole has done Tyler one better and just released a straight-up Gangsta Grillz mixtape.

Well, we made it. A week after an especially tempestuous Oscars telecast, the Grammys are coming back on April 3 after being rescheduled due to the COVID-19 Omicron variant. Along with a new date comes a new location: The 64th Grammy Awards, which typically take place in either Los Angeles or New York, will be held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, the city where the Latin Grammys are usually held each year. The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah is returning to host, and Jon Batiste of all people received the most nominations this year, followed by Doja Cat, H.E.R., and Justin Bieber.

Benny The Butcher made the Billboard Hot 100. Last month, after Benny released “Johnny P’s Caddy,” the first song from his new album Tana Talk 4, that song briefly cracked the American pop chart. This definitely wouldn’t have happened if J. Cole, one of the biggest rappers in the world, hadn’t rapped on the song. And even with Cole, it’s not like “Johnny P’s Caddy” ranks as an all-time crossover smash. The song notched one week on the Hot 100 and peaked at #72. Still, for a rapper as resolutely committed to the sounds and virtues of a previous age — one who’s historically been indifferent to things like putting choruses on his songs — that’s some kind of triumph. After slowly bubbling up from the underground for years upon years, Benny The Butcher has something resembling a pop hit, and he achieved that without changing a single fucking thing. That’s inspiring.

The storied Buffalo rap crew Griselda has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past few years, but they’re really on a hot streak now. A few weeks ago, Conway The Machine came out with his stunning album God Don’t Make Mistakes. Today, Conway’s cousin Benny The Butcher has come out with his own album Tana Talk 4, and it’s another great record from a team that’s absolutely in the zone right now.

North Carolina rap star J. Cole has had some bad luck with his Dreamville Festival. The festival was first supposed to come to North Carolina, Cole’s home state, in 2018, but it had to be cancelled because of Hurricane Florence. Cole did get to stage the festival in 2019, but there hasn’t been another Dreamville Fest since then on account of the pandemic. This year, the Dreamville Festival will finally return to Raleigh, with Cole headlining.

Last year, Kodak Black copped a plea. Kodak, the 24-year-old South Florida rapper, has been a celebrity for one third of his life, and he’s been in legal trouble for that entire tie. Ever since he gained viral fame as a 16-year-old, Kodack has been in and out of all manner of correctional facilities, but the case hanging over his head for the longest time was a 2016 sexual assault charge.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week’s countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.