There's a very specific reason why J. Cole's response to Kendrick Lamar is titled "7 Minute Drill."
According to the song's co-producer T-Minus, J. Cole has been tasking himself with literal seven-minute writing exercises lately, and "7 Minute Drill" was created during one of them.
"Cole likes to do these writing drills," T-Minus told Complex's Jordan Rose on Friday evening, midway through a Dreamville Festival panel called Chasing the Feeling. "He calls them 'seven-minute writing drills.' He'll write a joint for like seven minutes and see how far he can get. But he also does it with production. So over the last few years, when we cook up, he'll be like, 'Yo, make a beat in seven minutes. Go.'"
Sometime between the release of Kendrick's "Like That" diss and now, Cole and T-Minus sat down to do a seven-minute drill in the studio, which ultimately birthed both the beat and the verse for "7 Minute Drill." As T-Minus revealed, "We're in the studio and Cole is like, 'Yo, do a seven-minute beat. Let's go. Quick. Quick.' And sometimes I'll be like, 'You do a verse in seven minutes.' So after I did my seven-minute beat, I was like, 'It's your turn.' He's like, 'Yo, give me a word.' So I looked at my FL Studio system and I saw the word 'light,' so I was like, 'light.' He took it from there and started with 'light.' I left the room, gave him seven minutes, and came back. He's like, 'Yo, just give me another seven minutes. I think I've got something going.' And, you know, the rest is history."
It's unclear exactly how many minutes Cole took to complete the verse, since it sounds like he used some additional time to polish it off after the initial seven minutes, but it seems it was completed in a very short amount of time—potentially around 14 minutes, if you do the math from T-Minus' story.
Cole's manager Ibrahim Hamad recently spoke about these seven-minute drills during an interview on the Say Less Podcast, explaining, "It's basically his way of breaking out of overthinking."
Elsewhere in Jordan Rose's panel with T-Minus, the producer revealed that there actually isn’t a sample of Drake's “Energy” in the second half of the beat (produced by Conductor Williams), despite what many fans on Twitter have been saying.
As Dreamville Festival unfolds this weekend, it'll be interesting to see how this back-and-forth develops. It's going to be a fun spring.
