J. Cole turned up the heat in his ongoing rap beef with Kendrick Lamar with the release of “7 Minute Drill,” and one of the beatmakers behind the clap-back has now shared some new details about how the joint was conceived.
On Friday (April 5), T-Minus joined Complex‘s Jordan Rose at a Dreamville Festival panel and explained how the North Carolina native put together the song in question as a result of a self-imposed constraint.
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“Cole likes to do these writing drills,” he began. “He calls them ‘seven-minute writing drills.’ He’ll write a joint for like seven minutes and see how far he can get, but he also does it with production. So over the last few years, when we cook up, he’ll be like, ‘Yo, make a beat in seven minutes. Go.’
“Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘You do a verse in seven minutes.’ So after I did my seven-minute beat, I was like, ‘It’s your turn.’ He’s like, ‘Yo, give me a word.’ So I looked at my FL Studio system and I saw the word ‘light,’ so I was like, ‘light.’ He took it from there and started with ‘light.'”
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In this particular case, the 39-year-old MC seems to have taken more than just seven minutes to add final touches as his partner added: “I left the room, gave him seven minutes and came back. He’s like, ‘Yo, just give me another seven minutes. I think I’ve got something going.’ And, you know, the rest is history.”
T-Minus on the making of "7 Minute Drill" 👀
– J. Cole’s verse came from one of his 7-minute exercises.
– T-Minus made the beat in 7 minutes.
– J. Cole asked T-Minus to give him a word to start the song with…"I looked at my FL Studios system and I saw the word 'light'… and… pic.twitter.com/PnqmOPsdBi
— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) April 5, 2024
Earlier this week, the “Love Yourz” hitmaker hit back at K.Dot on his surprise project Might Delete Later.
Taking aim at the perceived quality of his friend-turned-foe’s catalog, he raps on the mixtape’s aforementioned closing track: “Your first shit was classic, your last shit was tragic/ Your second shit put n-ggas to sleep, but they gassed it/ Your third shit was massive and that was your prime/ I was trailin’ right behind and I just now hit mine.”
He continues: “Now I’m front of the line with a comfortable lead/ How ironic, soon as I got it, now he want somethin’ with me/ Well, he caught me at the perfect time, jump up and see.”
The Dreamville boss also channels JAY-Z‘s “Takeover” diss at Nas with the bars: “He averagin’ one hard verse like every 30 months or somethin’/ If he wasn’t dissin’, then we wouldn’t be discussin’ him.”
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He then compares his sparring match with Kendrick, who he once planned to record an album with, to the scene in New Jack City wherein Wesley Snipes‘ character Nino Brown tearfully kills his brother.
“Lord, don’t make me have to smoke this n-gga ’cause I fuck with him/ But push come to shove, on this mic, I will humble him/ I’m Nino with this thing, this that ‘New Jack City’ meme/ Yeah, I’m aimin’ at Gee Money, cryin’ tears before I bust at him,” he spits.
