Saturday (June 15th) marked the 10th anniversary of J. Cole's The Warm Up tape, the second full-length drop of his career, and the emcee took time to thanks fans for the journey thus far, reflecting on the quintessential work.
"10 years ago The Warm Up dropped," he penned in a tweet. "Thanks 2 all that have listened 2 the foundation of my whole journey."
In that same post, Cole made a casual revelation that he is currently "working" on bringing The Warm Up along with his Friday Night Lights project to the digital streaming platforms, marking yet another push in granting fans easier access to influential works that predated the streaming era.
"My catalogue on streaming services don’t even look right until this & FNL are up," He declared.
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The trip down memory lane would also incite a colorful tale from Cole's longtime friend and manager Ibrahim, who detailed the narrative behind the Warm Up artwork, touching on the fact that he wasn't aware so many people have often thought that the snow on the cover was photoshopped. According to him though, the process to make the photo happen was so taxing that it couldn't have been photoshopped.
In a series of tweets, Ibrahim reveals that the cover actually came to be outside of an old high school gym where the shoot was originally supposed to take place.
"We were suppose to shoot in my HS gym and it was snowing mad hard so my coach ain’t even show up to open the gym for us," he wrote. "Coach Lloyd left us out there in the snow...we shot that shit right outside of Holy Cross HS."
He would then pull out the receipts from the shoot to prove the levels they went to to get the right shot.
"Can’t believe n-ggaz was out there almost catching pneumonia and shit to get the right shot," he concluded. "my n-gga Cole out there in the freezing snow for hours just for the world to think it was fake the whole time."
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