J. Cole Points at His Own Bar and Calls It a Slim Shady Twang
On the No Bars Off podcast, J. Cole broke down the second verse of WHO TF IZ U line by line, stopped at the vocal tone, and named the source without being asked twice. The hosts had already clocked it. Here is the exact exchange, the timestamp, and why the admission fits a record he has been making since he was fifteen.
By @bradleymines ·
He was not asked about Eminem. He got there himself, mid-breakdown, and the hosts admitted they had been waiting for it.
On Monday, September 7, 2026, the No Bars Off show posted a 33-minute sit-down with J. Cole, filmed after his Atlanta date. The premise of the show is line-by-line verse autopsy, and the hosts, Sha Stimuli and Boardwalk Brown, spend the episode making Cole account for individual bars.
Twenty-two minutes in they reach the second verse of "WHO TF IZ U," the lead single from The Fall-Off. Cole starts to explain his thought process, then interrupts himself.
"First of all, it's like a twang in there. That's like a Slim Shady twang."
The hosts light up. "Okay, we wanted you to say that, cuz we recognise it too."
Cole, immediately: "Off rip. Even the delivery is paying homage to Eminem. Everybody know I knew it."
Then the honest part, which is the part worth keeping. "I don't know if I started it with that or if I caught it after I write, but at the end of the day I'm just letting the rhymes guide me."
Set to start at 22:15, just before the exchange. The full episode runs 33:16 and was posted September 7, 2026.
What he is actually pointing at
The bar under the microscope is the internal-rhyme run through "murder" and the PETA line about chopping a bird in half, and Cole raps it back to them three times to isolate what he means. The word he uses is "twang," which is a vocal-tone word rather than a flow word.
That distinction matters. Cole is not saying he borrowed a cadence. He is saying that when he stacks that many rhymes inside one bar, his voice does a thing to hold the pattern together, and the thing it does is Eminem's thing. The nasal push, the slight overpronunciation, the way the vowel gets bent to make the rhyme land. Anybody who has heard a bar off The Marshall Mathers LP knows the sound. Cole knows it well enough to name it while it is still coming out of his own mouth.
"WHO TF IZ U," track 8 on Disc 29. Produced by Cole with T-Minus, Vinylz, FnZ, Steve Bilodeau and Scotty Coleman. Second verse is where to go.
This is not new, and that is the point
Cole has been saying this for over a decade, and it keeps getting flattened into a headline. The most complete version is from December 2014, on Power 105.1 with Angie Martinez, in the middle of the "Fire Squad" argument.
"It's silly how big of an Eminem fan I am. There's a very select group of top notch people that I worship. Eminem was literally at the top of that list. My first song sounds like an Eminem bite."
He said a version of it again to Nardwuar in 2021, listing Eminem with Canibus, Royce da 5'9" and Big L as the punchline writers who built his teenage ear. He said it again to Kevin Hart in 2023.
What is different now is where he said it. This is not a career-retrospective question in a soft interview. This is a technical show, in the middle of a technical breakdown, with two MCs holding him to a single bar. Under that pressure, the reference he reaches for is Eminem.
The Fall-Off came out on February 6, 2026 and debuted at number one with 280,000 units. Its back cover is a photograph Cole took at fifteen of the posters on his bedroom wall. The front is the same age, the same room, his first sampler and his mother's CDs. The whole album is built as a return trip to that bedroom, which makes an unplanned Slim Shady inflection less of a coincidence and more of a receipt.
It runs both ways
Eminem has put Cole's name in his own accounting more than once. In a 2022 XXL interview he named Cole and Kendrick Lamar as the two he studies, saying they "rap to be the best rappers." On "Doomsday Pt. 2" in 2024 he rapped that he had "been at the level J. Cole been at."
The two have never made a record together. Given that Eminem just ended a 25-year gap with Jay-Z, that is worth noticing rather than assuming.
No Bars Off has said parts two and three of the Cole conversation are coming. If Eminem's name comes up again, we will have it.
Sources. The Cole quotes are from "J. COLE Joins The NO BARS OFF Show To Breakdown His Bars | WHO TF IZ U?", posted to the NoBarsOff Show channel on September 7, 2026, running 33:16; the exchange sits at roughly 22:15 to 22:45. The Fall-Off released February 6, 2026 on Cole World, Dreamville and Interscope, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 with 280,000 album-equivalent units; "WHO TF IZ U" went to US rhythmic radio on February 11, 2026 and peaked at 32 on the Hot 100. Cover art descriptions are from the album's own credits. The 2014 Angie Martinez quote is from Power 105.1, December 2014. Eminem's XXL comments date to 2022 and the "Doomsday Pt. 2" line to 2024. The video embed is the show's own upload and the audio embed is the official Spotify release.