J. Cole explains why he was upset at Jay-Z over a Drake comment

J. Cole has been sharing a lot of stories about the early days of his career. He's doing it on his new audio series Inevitable, where he and his manager Ibrahim "Ib" Hamad told a story about Jay-Z.

They talked about attending a dinner party in 2011 that was hosted by Jay and LeBron James. Cole signed to Jay-Z's company Roc Nation in 2009 but didn't create a hit at that point, which Jay brought up at that dinner. Drake and Future were also guests.

Hamad and Cole remember Jay asking Drake to help Cole and embarrassing the North Carolina rhymer in the process.

"We’re having a conversation, me, Cole, Drake, Future," Hamad explained. "So then Jay walks in and he sees all of us together. He goes, 'Yo!' and he looks at Drake and he says, 'Yo, give the boy one.' [He] points at Cole like, basically, 'Give him a hit.' We’re all like, 'What?' I even remember Future’s face being like, 'That’s embarrassing.'"

Cole then picked up the story and explained why Jay's comment bothered him. "There’s a legit competition [between me and Drake]," he said. "Commercially, it’s not competitive but culturally, it’s still a competitive sport where people were like, 'Cole or Drake?' And on top of that, I got a song with him on the project I just dropped three months ago!"

Cole followed that up by saying he was highly upset at Jay-Z, so he approached him while inebriated.

"I'm like, 'Yo, lemme ask you a question' — I’ve never spoken like this to Jay in my life — 'when you was working on Reasonable Doubt, did you have somebody telling you that you needed a single?’ He was like, 'Nah, I didn’t.'"

"'So why you keep doing that to me?'" Cole went on. "You over here trying to tell me I need one. You telling me to go in with [the pop producers] Stargate. It’s easy to put me in with Stargate after they already got 'Black & Yellow' by Wiz Khalifa. Where’s the vision?'"

After continuing to express himself, Jay said Cole was right, and he stopped asking him about hit singles.