Lil Yachty & J. Cole – “The Secret Recipe.” (Prod. The Alchemist)
Earlier this year, Lil Yachty took a sharp turn into psych-rock with his album Let’s Start Here. Since then, though, Yachty has been back on his rap shit. Just in the past few weeks, Yachty has released tracks with JID and Despot. Now, he’s joined forces with J. Cole, an old adversary, to rip an Alchemist bit to pieces.
There’s history here. Back in 2011, long before he broke into rap, Yachty was a kid tweeting disses about J. Cole. When asked about it in a 2016 interview, Yachty said, “I don’t know why, back in the day, I was heavy on saying, ‘Fuck J. Cole. I don’t know. I guess is music is just so lyrical, which don’t get me wrong. Let me clear this up. I gotta do this… I fuck with J. Cole, as a person. I don’t listen to J. Cole. But I have nothing against J. Cole. I was just talking shit, trolling.”
On his 2016 track “Everybody Dies,” Cole took a shot at Yachty: “Lil’ whatever, just another short-bus rapper.” Apparently, though, they’re cool now. In recent years, Cole has made a project of sitting down with the younger rappers who he once had issues with. Right now, Cole is on one of his guest-verse sprees, rapping on recent tracks from artists like Summer Walker and Gucci Mane. On the new track “The Secret Recipe.,” Yachty and Cole take turns rapping long, hook-free verses on a hazy track from the very busy Alchemist, who recently released the new albums Voir Dire with Earl Sweatshirt and Faith Is A Rock with Wiki and MIKE.
Lil Yachty acquits himself well on “The Secret Recipe.,” but J. Cole really goes crazy on the track. It might be one of Cole’s best verses: “Incoming call, press the button, the one that say ‘accept’/ He FaceTime to ask for a feature and saw the face of death/ I’m on your song, your streams goin’ up — not quite the Drake effect/ But don’t complain, bitch, take what you get and cut the label check.” In the song’s bare-bones video, Yachty and Cole rap together in an empty theater. Check it out below.