Kendrick Lamar Comes for Drake and J. Cole on Future and Metro Boomin’s Album: ‘Motherf*ck the Big 3, N***a It’s Just Big Me’

Drake (five Grammys/55 noms) and J. Cole (two wins/17 nods) linked for the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “First Person Shooter” on 2023’s For All the Dogs, where the Dreamville head rapped, “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, but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.” Drake preferred to pretend Kendrick doesn’t exist with his line, “Who the GOAT? Who you bitches really rooting for?/Like a kid that act bad from January to November, n***a, it’s just you and Cole.”

The two longtime friends followed that with “Evil Ways” and an extension of Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour subtitled after a recurring “First Person Shooter” line: “Big as the what?”

Kung-Fu Kenny, 36, and Drizzy, 37, teamed up three times in a year in 2011-12 on Take Care‘s “Buried Alive (Interlude),” good kid, m.A.A.d city‘s “Poetic Justice,” and ASAP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems.” They’ve been sending subs and not-so-subs ever since. Dot and 39-year-old Cole have a congenial history, collaborated on cuts including “Black Friday,” “Forbidden Fruit,” and Jeezy’s “American Dream,” and teased a hypothetical joint album for years.

Cole said last fall that he and Kendrick scrapped the idea because for them to “do something that’s full of our potential” they’d need to lock in for “at least a year.” He said he’ll speak about it in depth in the future, but what he elaborated to Lil Yachty in November included: “There’s a few beats, a gang of beats that I did—I gave him. … So he took them, and in that moment, we talked about, ‘Yo, bro, we should do a project.’ At that time, he’s not on like that, but I’m fuckin’ with him. … I think at that time, [Kendrick] being so excited—’cause that’s a look for him at that point—so I think he went to Twitter like, ‘Me and J. Cole got something crazy coming.’ … We put [the rumors] to bed years ago. But at one point in time, it was a real conversation, for sure.”