Happy Black Friday! All across America, families have turned the page on Thanksgiving and have begun prepping for other year-end holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah. With every retail store in the country putting their merchandise on a limited-time sale, Black Friday is best known as the day folks go out and buy gifts for their friends and family. However, on this day eight years ago, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole instead gave a unique gift to all of their fans.
Videos by American Songwriter
As the holiday season approached in 2015, both Lamar and Cole were coming off the magnum opus albums of their respective careers, To Pimp a Butterfly and 2014 Forest Hills Drive. As two of the most visible and beloved rappers of their generation at the time, many fans had been pleading for the pair to make a collaborative album.
In response to this, the two MCs decided to fan these flames by each releasing a song titled “Black Friday,” exclusively on SoundCloud. For Lamar’s rendition of “Black Friday,” he delivered a fiery, wildly impressive freestyle over the instrumental for J. Cole’s at-the-time recent hit “A Tale of Two Citiez.” For Cole’s “Black Friday,” as you would expect, he also performed a cutthroat freestyle over a beat used in a Lamar hit from that year, “Alright.”
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Whether it was Lamar’s raps about “bumping” The College Dropout in the White House if Kanye West were to be elected president, or Cole spitting lyrics about having a better way to fight these demons than the overactive drug use of his hip-hop peers, both “Black Friday” renditions were a huge success. Except, towards the end of Cole’s version, he decided to include a lyric that downplayed the potential for a collaborative LP between him and Lamar, something fans were unsure if they should take seriously or not.
It’s Cole fuckin’ world n***a
Dreamville in this motherfucker, Top Dawg in this motherfucker
“When you and K. Dot shit drop?”
Bitch never, they can’t handle two Black n****s this clever
As it turned out, Cole’s “never” response to the question about a project by him and Lamar was sincere. And to this day, rap fans around the world still bemoan the reality of the album never coming to fruition.
Earlier this year, Cole explained on Lil Yachty’s podcast why the tape never materialized.
“At one point it was a real thing. But bro, time and life, we ain’t ever got the chance to really go in and do it correctly,” he said. “Because that would take time, bro. For us to do something that’s full of our potential, that meets our real potential, you’re gonna need time. … At least a year. … We put it to bed years ago, but at least at one point in time, it was a conversation for sure.”
Regardless, we’ll always have the night of November 27, 2015 to cherish, when Lamar and Cole teamed up for a special “Black Friday” surprise. Revisit the two tracks below.
Photo by Santiago Bluguermann/Getty Images
