J. Cole is an intensely private person, often conflicted by fame. So if you’re one of the few celebrities with his phone number, he probably wouldn’t want you to broadcast that fact to your millions of followers. Naturally, Kanye West ignored that memo and tweeted out a (since-deleted) screenshot of himself on a call with Cole last month amid his screenshotting spree. Cole now tells radio host Angie Martinez that he felt used by Kanye and got an apology. “He called me, but I would have never posted that or, like, tell him to post that. That made me feel a certain type of way. I told him that. He apologized, for the record,†he says. “I told him that it felt like you just used my name in that very quick conversation for social media and to keep your thing going, whatever you were doing. It just felt like it wasn’t sincere because of that.â€
Cole says he feared that the tweet could have been misinterpreted as him agreeing with Kanye’s views, which isn’t the case. Instead, he says Kanye wants Cole to keep him in line: “He said, right off the rip, ‘Man, I need you to hold me accountable. Keep me in check. Say whatever you gotta say. I need that. I feed off that.’†Cole responded, “‘Are you sure? Because I see this a certain way.’ Actually, on the phone, I was concerned for him. That’s the real truth. I was wondering like, ‘Yo, am I supposed to be helping this dude?’ When you empower a demographic of people whose whole intent is to suppress and oppress people, I can’t rock with that.†He added, “You’re not freethinking when your ego is pulling the strings.â€