During a recent podcast interview, J. Cole’s manager Ibrahim “IB” Hamad spilled new details about Cole's alleged confrontation with Diddy back in 2013.
IB's sharing of new details came weeks after the altercation was finally confirmed by the North Carolina rapper on his new song “Let Go My Hand” — off his recently released album The Off-Season — which features an outro from Diddy.
“My last scrap was with Puff Daddy, who would’ve thought it?” Cole raps. “I bought that ni**a album in seventh grade and played it so much / You would’ve thought my favorite rapper was Puff / Back then I ain’t know sh*t, now I know too much.”
While Cole confirmed the fight on the track, he didn't reveal details about what actually went down as many have long speculated that he was defending Kendrick Lamar — a rumor that was dispelled by IB.
“The Puff story… I mean remember hearing it and just laughing ’cause I was there,” Hamad said on the podcast, per Complex.
“I’m not gonna go into detail, but it’s definitely not what people are saying," he continued, seemingly squashing the rumor that the fight between Cole and Diddy began after Cole intervened when Diddy tried to pour a drink on Kendrick while the two argued about his verse on Big Sean’s “Control.”
“It was definitely not like he was defending Kendrick or something,” the Dreamville Records co-founder clarified. “It wasn’t like, ‘Don’t talk to Kendrick like that!’ Kendrick was there, Top [Dawg] was there, Jay was there, Beyoncé was there. Me and Cole. You know, grown men… Got a little heated. All I remember is, me and Jay looking at each other like, ‘Oh, these n***as ’bout to fight.’ And then just being like, ‘Oh no, this is ’bout to happen.’ I’ll just leave it at that.”
“Walking out of there I’m like, ‘Oh, this about to be bad,'” IB added. “But for some reason no one had a camera out, a couple people was talking about it, but you know.”
He went on to share that Cole and Diddy met up and squashed their beef the very next day. “Puff was like, ‘I wanna figure this out.’ The next day, he pulled up, they chopped it up. It was never a real issue,” he recalled.
IB also shared that Diddy’s vocals for “Let Go My Hand” were recorded in “the last week” of sessions for The Off-Season.
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