TDE president Terrence “Punch” Henderson has come to Kendrick Lamar‘s defense following J. Cole‘s new diss track.
The Dreamville boss released his surprise new mixtape Might Delete Later on Friday (April 5), and unleashed a barrage of bars aimed at Kendrick on the closing track “7 Minute Drill.”
Among them were shots at the Compton rapper’s decorated catalog, most notably To Pimp a Butterfly which Cole suggested was snooze-worthy.
“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 rapped.
Punch, whose TDE label Kendrick was previously signed to, took to X following the song’s release to defend the critically acclaimed album from Cole’s criticism.
“SMH. I thought to pimp a butterfly was pretty good,” he wrote.
Punch also called out his former signee’s “haters” in the music industry: “The current rap climate got me realizing a lot of you music industry ppl are Kdot haters. lol you telling me you n-ggas been secretly hating ALL this time!”
He later clarified: “‘music industry ppl’, I’m definitely NOT referring to the rappers involved here. I’m talking about the folks that work in music. You n-ggas.”
Elsewhere on “7 Minute Drill,” J. Cole channeled JAY-Z‘s “Takeover” Nas diss and took more shots at his Kendrick Lamar.
“He averagin’ one hard verse like every 30 months or somethin’/ If he wasn’t dissin’, then we wouldn’t be discussin’ him,” he rapped, later adding: “Four albums in 12 years, n-gga, I can divide/ Shit, if this is what you want, I’m indulgin’ in violence.”
The North Carolina native did, however, express reluctance to diss his friend-turned-foe, comparing their sparring match to the scene in New Jack City where Wesley Snipes’ character Nino Brown tearfully kills his own 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 spit.
“7 Minute Drill” came in response to Kendrick’s scathing guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” on which he took aim at Cole and, most notably, Drake.
Referencing the pair’s hit single “First Person Shooter,” he rapped: “Fuck sneak dissin’, first-person shooter, I hope they came with three switches … Motherfuck the big three, n-gga, it’s just big me.”
Kendrick has yet to respond to Cole’s diss track.
When you know white people are overinvolved in hip hop. They have this on greatest all time lists. Nobody in the hood is bumping that shit.
You talk about white people a lot. What’s up, did one of them nut in your bum or something?
I talk about them because they ruined hip hop like they do everything else they get their hands on. Soon as the white executives took over with hip hop, it went to shit. If you’re a fan of it, you would know this objectively without anyone telling you. Even if you’re white, you would admit as much. They saw it as what it had become by the end of the 90s, the industry’s biggest cash cow, and did what they always do, circled in like sharks. Why in the hell would you not think some stuffy white people focused on money as their priority wouldn’t have destroyed it?
Okay so you’re a delusional racist that thinks black people haven’t had anything to do with the direction of their own genre. That was probably the stupidest post I’ve read on this site and that is an incredible achievement. Hate to give you a reality check but rappers chased the money, do you actually listen to rap or just skim through it?
Lol what? Whites (not whites actually. You’re identifying them falsely) we’re record executives from the beginning, because they (again, not whites) started it with Hollywood. 80s hiphop stars were in the labels. So we’re the 90s guys like Pac (interscope was above death row), dmx, JayZ, Em, Dre, NWA, Big Pun, Luda, Jadakiss, Rakim, and so on. What really has ruined hiphop is just current culture. Guess what, current culture sucks. Tiktok Era sucks. There are MILLIONS who hate New age rappers, but guess what? If HALF of the people who claim Nas is goat or top 5 bought each of his records on release, he’d be the too selling rapper in history. Yet, it’s crickets.
You mean white like Steve Rifkind and all the “trash” albums Loud has put out from Wu-Tang, Big Pun Mobb Deep, M.O.P, Prodigy, Raekwon, Killarmy, Pete Rock, Xzibit, dead prez, The Beatnuts and Tha Alkaholiks?
Racism has nothing to do with the truth bitch. So you’re in here running interference for the white executives that destroyed an art form I used to love, and you got your panties in a bunch because I said they’re white. FOH out of here cornball. Sorry if that hurts your feelings like you have anything in common with them aside from your skin color. The black people who handed it over to them and let them do it just as long as they got paid are just as disgusting. Miley Cyrus and Post Malone getting the whole industry working with them when neither of them could give a fuck about hip hop but wanted to fuck with the hottest genre out there instead of lame ass country music. When you’re a piece of shit like you though who is not here for the art form, you think it’s okay because people of your same race fucked it over and left it in the unrecognizable state it’s in. We used to get a hot new batch of up and coming emcees every couple of years, and it had variety, but these people did what they did to rock and roll, to everything before. To what they did to the movie industry. They sucked the life out of it like a vampire in the name of money, and you think it’s cool.
Are you seriously saying Steve Rifken cultivated the talent at Loud? Furthermore, are you saying that he and his fellow white executives were the ones with their ear to the street. On that same note, do you think David fucking Geffen was behind the hip hop shit he got behind like the Geto Boys? White people were in distribution deals and had money behind a lot of black labels, but they didn’t make the decisions before the money exploded punk bitch. That’s the difference. They didn’t say this is what the next star is going to look like. These are the songs that need to be coming out. We need no messages in the music. By the 2000s, this is what the major labels were doing and ruined the game. Furthermore, there were always genuine white people who loved hip hop, but we’re definitely not talking about these people who fucked it up. If you think they’ve been a net positive on what we’ve been listening to, you’re just as shitty as they are.
Jimmy Iovine was not telling Suge Knight how to run Death Row. Mofos were legit on opposite ends of the same hall, and he notoriously did not get involved when everybody in the industry knew the fuckery that went on down there. If you’re that stupid and don’t see how that changed from then to the early to mid 2000s, we don’t even need to speak any further. Furthermore, anyone would tell you the way even the majors handled urban divisions of their parent labels changed after they saw how much money they were raking in, and of course, they got more involved because these people are insane narsicists who think they know best about everything. You white cornballs here arguing this watered down shit is better for us is proof positive of that. You white clowns always do stay on code, especially when fucking black people over.
@silent_partner, relax man. At the end of the day, people do WHAT SELLS. It’s a BUSINESS. Record labels do not exist to lose money to make art. And ready for the truth? Nas can’t never sell more than 50k records in a week on a new release, ever. But Drake can. Cardi B can. Lil Nas X can. Point? It’s a business. And real hiphop isn’t selling because hiphop heads don’t pay for music. We’re still torrenting and downloading for free lol. That, and the younger generations don’t like the sounds we grew up with. I don’t like the sounds they like. We’re different generations raised with different technology. You can’t expect record companies to push people like Nas over dbags like Lil Nas X, when once can rake in a million and the other can rake in $100 million. The entire world is about money and resources. Always has been. It’s not black n white. It’s green. People will F anyone to get that green.
@silent also, Jimmy lovine was behind Suge n death row bailing out Pac, so saying he wasn’t involved with death row is a joke. You probably watched that corny and misleading “biopic” Compton and believed all that BS that Dre n Cube peddled. It was bogus. Dre n cube were the ONLY two of NWA who were total phonies and actors. Cube, a gated community kid, Dre, a funk n pop artist who was never a thug and decided to do what would be cool to sell records.
That’s also why dr Dre has always found a way to shade 50 Cent over the years. He was everything Dre claimed to be and the world knew it. At least Eminem never claimed to be hard like that he just claimed he would fuck you up and he would . Dr Dre on the other hand acted like a jealous silver spoon Jimmy ovine daddy’s girl prom queen
It was selling great before they fucked it up is the problem. Half of the proceeds while they had no input wasn’t good enough. They wanted all of them even if it meant worse product, and as long as people kept buying, it was fine. You don’t see the problem with that? I won’t relax because that’s how it got fucked up. It’s not just hip hop. It’s every aspect of our lives. How many times did some big company buy out the little one, and then the cost cutting that turns the product to shit happens? It’s a way of life in America. Well, this one thing, some of us happened to love once upon a time and are disgusted. So we won’t be quiet about it.
Jimmy put the money up, but he wasn’t getting Pac out of prison until Suge asked him to and said he’d take him on. He had been trying to push Pac onto Death Row as far back as 1993. Furthermore, some of you have bad reading comprehension. Interscope and Death Row were a 50:50 venture. Jimmy Iovine had shit to do with how they operated, cultivated talent, etc. Even with Interscope proper where Pac was signed directly to, Jimmy was not the dude finding artists and shit. They had an urban division. All of the labels did. That’s the problem. They cut out the middle man and started getting more involved and fucked it up in the process, but saw no problem because the profits kept growing.
“At least Eminem never claimed to be hard like that he just claimed he would fuck you up and he would.” @ Officer Ricky, Em was never fucking anybody up except pop stars, please get that man’s dick out ya mouth.
@silent again man, you’re angry at a business chasing profits over… good content. Business is about one thing only. Money. Money is it. Business is not about anything else. Luckily nowadays, you don’t need a record deal or to sell out to get known and make a living. Plenty of truly independent artists make it and start their own things. I’d place more blame on talented people being down to sell out than rich record companies being willing to buy them out. The people who sell their souls are worse than the ones buying, because they’ll sacrifice their craft for money. The business men are simply in it for the cash. The artists however are often in it for the craft.
Who said I don’t blame them too? I have shit on enough of these new rappers the last 15 or 20 years to make my disdain for them obvious. Just like I said I blame the black people in power who cashed out to them for a profit and let them run with it with no input going forward. However, I’m always going to blame people who have more power and money who couldn’t have given one fuck about what we had going on until they saw it making money who then came in and destroyed that once great thing by chasing profits over everything. It also brought different kinds of people to the genre who were like I don’t care about this shit. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it. Tell me whose dick to suck, and I’ll do it. Like I mentioned earlier, Miley Cyrus and Post Malone literally went the hip hop route and got everybody in the game to work with them because it was the way for them to become stars.
You not lying bro I read everything you said in two different books with the same exposing the industry theme. First was Hip Hop America and the Death of Rhythm and Blues both by Nelson George. Keep speaking the truth, some ppl get real uneasy when ppl get exposed esp in books and on documentaries. Keep up the debate with the ppl that don’t know that they are talking about. If y’all want to challenge it read the two books I just mentioned…
J. Cole is the last person that needs to talk about someone’s music being boring.
I’ve decided that to fight racism, I will no longer recognize ANYONE who uses the super hate filled “N Word” as human beings any longer! Deport anyone who uses that racist word!!!