Before J. Cole became a hip hop star, he faced moments of rejection, including a meeting with Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, that left him unfazed and motivated to prove himself.
As an up-and-coming rapper, J. Cole was not immune to getting the cold shoulder from people who had some weight in the game. On his new podcast, “Inevitable”, Cole reminisced about a meeting with Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s longtime manager, that did not exactly scream “star power” at the time.
Cole recalled how, in the late 2000s, he and his manager Ibrahim Hamad were starting to meet major industry players. Among them was Paul Rosenberg, whose disinterest in the meeting did not deter Cole one bit:
After that meeting [with G-Unit], we got a meeting with two people: one was Chris Lighty and the other was – I think Sha [Money XL] had something to do with this – he got us a meeting with Paul Rosenberg, who is Eminem’s manager forever and runs Shady Records. Just like being at Fifty’s house and meeting Mark Pitts, it was, “Now we’re talking momentum”. Just a year prior, I was fucking waiting outside on some Hail Mary shit for JAY-Z, and now I’m getting real momentum of people calling, like, they want to come and see us, they want us to pull up and play music.
Chris Lighty’s energy was more like, “Yo, I’m just gonna give y’all some game. Y’all young niggas I heard about, boom boom boom”. And Paul Rosenberg genuinely felt like he was disinterested and didn’t give a fuck. It literally felt like it was a favour. There was no vibe to that meeting; he didn’t see it, he didn’t get it. Which is cool, he didn’t play us at all.
Once again, I didn’t give a fuck because it was momentum. The fact that I was right there with Eminem’s fucking manager and somehow I made it to him and on his fucking radar was just more proof of, “Yo, just keep doing what you’re fucking doing”.
The rejection didn’t slow Cole down. He would soon sign with JAY-Z’s Roc Nation and build a career that even Eminem salutes today. Slim Shady gave Cole a shout-out on “Doomsday Pt. 2”, rapping, “I been at the level J. Cole been at”.
Clearly, not signing to Shady Records has not become J. Cole’s loss. What do you think about Rosenberg missing out on Cole?
