J. Cole quickly put an end to an aspiring rapper’s dreams after a demo tape was thrown on stage.
Cole was performing on the It’s All a Blur — Big As The What? Tour with Drake this week when a fan seized the opportunity to throw their CD on stage.
The disc was lobbed on stage in a plastic case that split in half, catching the Dreamville rapper’s attention.
“N-gga threw his demo up here,” he said, poking fun at the culprit in front of the arena crowd. “It’s 2024, n-gga. USB is okay.”
Cole went into the next song and kicked part of the packaging off stage before throwing the rest of the CD to the side.
Watch the clip below.
J. Cole is no stranger to being turned down by his idols either, with JAY-Z famously curving him when he was trying to get on his radar.
After hearing about Hov’s American Gangster album in 2007, the North Carolina native — who moved to New York to attend St. John’s University — came up with a plan to pitch beats for the project.
“This was my chance. It was like a sign,” he told ABC News in 2009. “God is telling me to get on this album. So I was praying on it.”
The future rap star went home and started making beats. Later that day, he headed to the Roc the Mic studio in NYC’s and waited in the rain with hopes he would run into JAY-Z.
“Maybe we could just slide him the CD and if we slide him the CD, he’ll go upstairs and listen to it, and if he listens to it, he’s gonna love it and he’s gonna send down, you know, for me to come upstairs and he’s probably going to sign me — or whatever was in my head,” he said.
J. Cole waited for hours before JAY-Z eventually rolled up in a black Rolls Royce Phantom. He mumbled a few words and handed the CD to Hov, to which he replied: “Man, I don’t want that.”
The setback didn’t derail Cole’s career as he eventually signed to JAY-Z’s Roc Nation in 2009, releasing all six of his platinum-selling studio albums on the label.
