{"id":464530,"date":"2026-02-07T14:10:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T14:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/464530\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T14:10:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T14:10:40","slug":"j-cole-what-if-track-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/464530\/","title":{"rendered":"J. Cole: \u201cWhat If\u201d Track Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

J. Cole<\/a> continues to be the preeminent face of a specific microgenre I like to call Podcast Rap, the general idea being that you don\u2019t have to listen to these songs more than once, but they\u2019ll give a roundtable of dinguses something to chew on for a week. \u201cWhat If,\u201d off Cole\u2019s new album The Fall-Off, is an instant Podcast Rap classic. On this track, Cole raps from the perspectives of Biggie and Tupac and imagines a timeline where they apologize to each other and mend their brotherhood through cute Nicholas Sparks letters before things get tragic. It\u2019s skillful rapping: He weaves in and out of hypothetical conversations and biographical details; he captures little intricacies of their flows and manner of speech. But this isn\u2019t a song about Biggie and Tupac, it\u2019s Cole\u2019s bird\u2019s-eye view of the Drake<\/a> and Kendrick<\/a> beef\u2014an important condition of Podcast Rap is to still care deeply about that beef. All the drama in 2024 made Cole come to a profound conclusion, one that\u2019s only been 41 years in the making: What if we all got along? OK guys, mics on:<\/p>\n

Joe Budden: Cole is talking that shit, this is dope!<\/p>\n

Joe Budden Employee # 1: You gotta salute him for being a real man. Too many of us are afraid of the accountability that comes with apologies.<\/p>\n

Joe Budden Employee #2: As a man, I\u2019d never apologize to one of my homies.<\/p>\n

Joe Budden: That\u2019s \u2019cause you\u2019re a fucking asshole who needs therapy.<\/p>\n

Joe Budden Employee #2: My ex-wife tried to get me to go to therapy. You know I\u2019m always saying\u2014<\/p>\n

Joe Budden Employee #3: Come on guys, enough of that. Let\u2019s take it back to Cole\u2014you could say this is really why he deserves his spot in the Big Three.<\/p>\n

Joe Budden: That\u2019s why I\u2019m not paying you.<\/p>\n

Thank you for giving us this rich text, Cole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"J. Cole continues to be the preeminent face of a specific microgenre I like to call Podcast Rap,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,39746,1672],"class_list":["post-464530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-tracks","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}