I don't know, man. If I was J. Cole, I would've taken this information to my grave.

As crazy as the whole situation around "Like That" and J. Cole dissing Kendrick was that it was somehow behind the scenes even crazier because what we came to know as The Fall Off, J. Cole's final double album, which just dropped, was pretty much done, and it had two Kendrick Lamar features on it. Crossovers that frankly people have been begging for for years.

For a while there was that rumor of the Kendrick Lamar/J. Cole EP/mixtape/album that never came to be. Two features on a new record would at least bring us close to that experience.

Leaks, combined with Kendrick's "Like That" verse, pretty much twisted Cole's arm behind his back and put the man in a position where he needed to reset and essentially redo the record.

Sadly, the optics/politics of putting those features out into the world after an unsuccessful diss track just would have looked kind of weird, I guess.

As bad as this looks for Cole, personally as a fan, it just makes me kind of sad, because regardless of how any of that would have read, releasing it into the world, chances are, like, it would have just been good music for all of us to listen to.