Black Thought Talks About ‘Scaring Off’ J. Cole From Collaboration, Praises Rapper for Apologizing to Kendrick Lamar

Black Thought had some doubts about a J. Cole-assisted joint album that sent the Dreamville leader packing.

Thought, born Tariq Trotter, was a guest on the latest episode of 1Hood Media podcast This Week in White Supremacy, where he revealed that Cole once approached him about doing a collaborative LP. However, plans fell through when Trotter was honest with the “First Person Shooter” co-artist about his beat selection.

“I don’t know the brother well, but he and I had talked about doing music together at one point. At the beginning of 2018, he hit me like, ‘Yo, let’s do an album,’” The Roots frontman recounted around the 29-minute mark of the episode.

He continued, “I told him to send me some music. I told him I was with it. It wasn’t, ‘Send me some music to see if I want to do it’; it was like, ‘Send me–Let me see what you’re thinking.”

But Cole’s sound veered away from what Trotter was going for. “He sent me a batch of beats and they all just felt so close to something Roots-centric,” Trotter added. “At the time, I was trying to sort of step outside of what I’d done with The Roots, and I just didn’t feel like we were lining up.”

After asking Cole “to do a different batch,” Trotter guessed that his “explanation” about the beats “scared him off.” “Maybe some of the trigger words that I was using, like, ‘I want something hard. This beat ain’t aggressive enough,'” Trotter said. “He wasn’t on that. He was on a peaceful journey.”

While the project never came to fruition, Trotter gave Cole his props for apologizing to Kendrick Lamar after addressing him on “7 Minute Drill.”

“What we’ve yet to see is somebody nip that in the bud, right? That’s what I felt like he was in effect doing,” Trotter said. “It just showed humility, nobility and a sense of elevation that you don’t see too often across the board.”