Noname Has Hit Back At J.Cole With The Brutal New Track ‘Song 33’
"He really bout to write about me when the world is in smokes?...When George begging for his mother saying he couldn't breathe, you thought to write about me?"
This week, the world of hip-hop has become embroiled in a strange, one-sided beef between J. Cole and young rising star Noname.
It all started when Cole released his first song in a year, ‘Snow on Tha Bluff’. Supposedly a song about the Black Lives Matter movement, Cole instead decided to open up the track with a multi-verse diss against Noname.
“I scrolled through her timeline in these wild times, and I started to read,” he raps about an unnamed “young” woman. “She mad at these crackers, she mad at these capitalists, mad at these murder police.”
The diss was particularly confusing given that Noname has never explicitly called out Cole. Rather, in a now deleted Tweet, she called out inaction from the rap establishment generally.
“Poor black folks all over the country are putting their bodies on the line in protest for our collective safety and y’all favourite top selling rappers not even willing to put a tweet up,” she wrote. “Whole discographies be about black plight and they no where to be found.”
But that didn’t stop Cole from doubling down on the diss, tweeting, “I stand behind every word of the song that dropped last night.”
Morning. I stand behind every word of the song that dropped last night.
— J. Cole (@JColeNC) June 17, 2020
Throughout the whole process, Noname remained totally silent. That is, until today, when she dropped a song full of references to the Cole dispute.
Titled ‘Song 33’, the track is only a minute long, but takes aim at the patriarchy, institutionalised racism, and political inaction.
“One girl missing another one go missing,” Noname raps, referring to a spate of murders and disappearances targeting the African-American community in recent weeks. “But n****s in the back quiet as a church.”
Later, she takes on Cole more specifically.
“He really bout to write about me when the world is in smokes? … When George begging for his mother saying he couldn’t breathe, you thought to write about me?”
You can read the full lyrics to the song below, and listen to the track here:
— Noname (@noname) June 18, 2020