Why Does Ye “Hate” J. Cole So Much? A Brief Explainer Of Their Complicated History

Ye seems to have beef with half of the music industry. After taking shots at the likes of Playboi Carti, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and more, the Chicago multi-hyphenate decided to spin the block on J. Cole on Tuesday (April 1) night.

Reacting to a clip from Benny The Butcher’s “Johnny P’s Caddy,” which features the Dreamville Records founder, Ye penned on X, “I hate J. Cole’s music so much.” He added, “It’s between Kendrick and J. Cole.”

“I bet [if] you industry plants asked J. Cole to diss Drake, then we would have been accosted with a J. Cole Super Bowl commercial with no SZA song to save it,” Ye continued, presumably referring to Lamar and the Top Dawg Entertainment songstress’ live rendition of “luther” and “All The Stars” at February’s Big Game.

“No one listens to J. Cole after [losing] their virginity,” according to Ye, who later brought up a conversation he and Drake had while working on 2021’s Donda: “Most of the [conversation] was me telling him he was hurting Hip Hop by giving J. Cole a platform, and I was saying how much I loved Future.”

Much of Ye’s grudge toward the 2014 Forest Hills Drive creator seems to come from “False Prophets,” which many fans have long speculated was about the father of four. “He’s fallin’ apart, but we deny it / Justifying that half-a** s**t he dropped, we always buy it,” J. Cole rapped over the 2016 effort. “When he tell us he a genius, but it’s clearer lately / It’s been hard for him to look into the mirror lately.”

“I don’t listen to J. Cole, so I wouldn’t even know. I just heard he had a song called ‘False [Prophets],’ and somebody told me it was halfway about me,” Ye explained to Justin Laboy during the debut episode of “The Download.”

Ye Previously Dissed J. Cole On His “Like That (Remix)”

Before the interview, in April 2024, Ye took a page out of Lamar’s playbook and dissed both Drake and the North Carolina native over the instrumental for Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.” He spat, “Play J. Cole, get the p**sy dry / Play this s**t back 130 times.”

J. Cole, who’s arguably one of the most universally liked rappers despite Ye’s claims, hasn’t publicly responded to the diss. Honestly, most of the people the “Heartless” hitmaker mentioned in his more recent anti-Semitic rants — Travis Scott, Pusha T, John Legend and Tyler, The Creator, to name a few — haven’t either, aside from Playboi Carti and Jim Jones.