I'm curious about the Sideline Story behind the scenes. Had to have been a chaotic time for J Cole

I think the only way Cole outsells Jay is if Jay silently releases an album to DSPs without telling anyone

It’s still a better album

Every cole album outsold every Jay album last decade

I agree

Workout and Cant Get Enough are dogshit songs who gives a s*** how “big” they were

Remember when Jay sold a million copies via Sprint for mchg

I forget Missy Elliott was on Nobody's Perfect. Say what you will about Cole World, but they tried to get it off the ground

The quality of those songs isn't Jay's fault, Jay helped his career by not letting him release FNL because it would've flopped despite maybe getting better reviews

Jay dropped 1 album in the last 10 years and it was exclusive to Tidal for a while

The full force of Illuminati behind Meg
A verse on Mr Nice Watch for J Cole

im still not gonna try to understand how that works

The fact they had to be on the album period is Jays fault

Workout and definitely can’t get enough arent the reason Sideline story was so successful

The fan base Cole had is the reason

We are strong

We are Cole World

No blanket

The best outcome would of been mixing both the albums to make it his debut. Cause he did need the SS hits just like Kendrick needed songs like Swimming Pools, BDKMV and Maad City. Just FNL alone would not of been a good major level debut

Meg sweeping the grammy's is when I accepted they're just paid marketing

This

Plus I don’t give a s*** that Nas didn’t like it. Workout is a bop and it’s perfectly reasonable that Jay didn’t want to put the album out without a hit. Cole could have not signed to a major and dropped independently (like Jay did with RD) if he wanted full control

I don’t disagree with that

But making an artist like Cole chase hits was so redundant imo

And forcing himself on a song like Mr nice watch was so nasty

The sprint thing was with 4:44, my bad, and it was a Tidal exclusive for a bit. Sprint bought a million copies and gave them away as promo.

With Mchg, it was a deal with Samsung whereby Samsung purchased a million copies to distribute with its phones, but they didn't count towards billboard first week (it actually sold 500k+ on the first week)

A collab album for Jay Electronica
A placement on BP3 for J Cole

You know Cole heard Jays verse in Light Up and thought “yo why can’t I get a verse like this?”

I’ve always liked the commercial songs on Sideline Story

Work Out
Can’t Get Enough
Nobody’s Perfect
Even Mr Nice Watch

I used to bump regularly and will still let play when it comes on

Tbh it's a good album idk why Cole feels so bad about it

Mr. Nice Watch the only awful song on that album, for the most part it aged pretty well

Highly recommend his pod series if you haven’t listened to it

It and Thank Me Later have a lot of the same critiques but they’re both enjoyable listens and are light years ahead of the trash we get today