When J. Cole's debut project, The Come Up hosted by DJ OnPoint released on May 4, 2007, it showcased his raw technical and hungry skills that would get him signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. So, the backstory to that is he attended St. John's University in New York when he tried to hand Jay a beat CD but got rejected. This fueled him to use those same beats and craft The Come-Up mixtape. With songs like "Simba", "Dollar and a Dream" and "School Daze", Cole's raw delivery made this feel more like an album even with him rapping over Hov's "Dead Presidents". This project showed us that he could not just hold his own but gave us a glimpse into what this mixtape run would be! Garnering over 500,000 streams on DatPiff alone, to the fans it's almost looked at as Cole's origin story. So if you're ready to go back when mixtapes were aggressive and punchline-heavy then stream this down below. Courtesy of Internet Archives.
