Deciphering Symba’s “Father Figure”

Rap spent 2024 begging grown men to go to war. Symba watched that from the West Coast and said out loud what half the culture whispered. Cole came back, told him, basically, sit down, I’m your father.

“Y’all toddlers to me, stop botherin’ me
Young Simba, some niggas threw some hate my way
But only thing they should say is, ‘Cole, you like a father to me.’” — J. Cole on “Bronx Zoo Freestyle.”

Everybody wants to talk about fathers right now. The word gets tossed around in interviews and captions like it costs nothing, like calling yourself somebody’s dad is the same as raising them. A whole corner of rap has settled into this posture where the older guys expect the younger ones to kneel, and the younger ones either comply or get called ungrateful. Meanwhile, the people who were supposed to hold the line when it mattered walked away from the biggest test the culture handed them in years. Symba walks into all of that with "Father Figure," and the first thing he does is refuse to simplify it. He grabs Drake’s “Stories About My Brother” beat produced by Conductor Williams, stitched from family loyalty and brothers bragging on each other, and repurposes it for a song where family is the open wound. That beat selection alone is a quiet provocation. A record originally built for celebrating your people, now carrying the weight of questioning whether those same people raised you crooked.

It seems like that man is being used for a diss record nowadays. But not this one.

The opening verse begins with a birth year.

“Pops was born in ‘73; he had love for the streets.”

That puts his father squarely in the generation raised on crack-era New York and West Coast gangsta rap, which means Symba is immediately telling you what kind of curriculum he inherited. His dad had women everywhere, “a kid on every street,” barely knew himself at twenty-something, and still managed to leave behind a complete education in image.

“He taught me how to dress, how to talk, how to finesse
How to flex, how to check, how to step, how to press.”

A full syllabus in performing manhood without ever being asked whether the performance is hollow. His father handed him swagger before he offered him stability, schooled him on how to move like a player before the kid even understood what a relationship was supposed to require. “He barely knew himself, ain’t teach me what he didn’t know,” pins the tragedy right there. You can’t pass down self-knowledge you never earned. What transfers instead is the hustle, the image maintenance, the ability to walk into a room looking like you’ve figured it out while your insides are bare. That’s a seductive model for a young Black man, because it produces results in public. Attention, women, respect. The bill arrives later, privately, when you realize the only version of yourself you own is the costume.

Then the turn hits. “Hip-hop is my pop, but that’s just how I was raised.” The whole first verse retroactively becomes a description of the culture itself. Every quality he pinned to his father (flashy, absent but present, a way with words, money problems, never really home) fits rap as an institution just as tightly. Hip-hop moved out west looking for room to compete. It planted a kid on every block. It drilled millions of boys on how to dress and talk and finesse before it ever showed them how to grieve or hold still. That swap from literal father to cultural father rewrites the entire argument, because the personal story was an accusation all along. And Symba lets the double meaning just sit there, breathing.

The second verse digs into damage. “Pops had a dark side I ain’t see at first/The fame and the flash was a mask to cover up his hurt.” That’s a clean portrait of what hip-hop looked like to kids in the ‘90s and 2000s, all gold and bravado on the surface, self-destruction running underneath the floorboards. “Had me thinking love was soft, showing pain’s the worst” is devastating if you grew up in a house or a neighborhood where that was the unspoken law. Symba is describing an upbringing where burying your feelings is the first lesson and spending recklessly is the second. “Taught me how to get money but not how to keep it” applies to a hundred rappers who went broke after their first deal. “He fed the whole block, everybody ate/Put his people on, showed them different ways” covers the part of the father you brag about, the generosity, the communal loyalty, the plate-passing. Then the turn: “He could save you and destroy you, that’s the gift and curse/Angel and a demon, hard to tell what came first.” This father, this genre, can pay your rent and gut your self-worth in the same afternoon.

“Gave me scars, gave me bars, don’t know which is which
Made me rich, made me sick, ain’t that a bitch.”

That couplet is the sharpest thing on the record. He can’t untangle what rap did for his career from what it did to his head. The scars and the bars occupy the same body. The money and the sickness share a bloodstream. He could’ve gone scorched-earth after all that. He goes somewhere harder.

“I can’t hate him for his flaws ‘cause it’s all he knew.”

That’s a grown-up sentence. The genre was incomplete, and it passed along what it had, and what it had was warped, and the kids who absorbed it inherited the warp with no manual for correction.

Verse three widens the family photograph, and it’s a crowded frame. Pac handed down rage, B.I.G. left behind warnings, Snoop provided the cool, and E-40 taught the slang. Wayne and Game were the alien brothers. Ye fed them soul and then starved them of it. Drake carried the name worldwide while Cudi and Roddy wrote the melodies, YoungBoy supplied the motor, Kendrick ground the pen to a blade, and Cole convinced everybody they belonged in the same sentence as the greats. Think about the kind of composite man all of those fathers build. A person wired for confrontation from birth, who reads every challenge as a call to answer, who has never once been told that silence could be a strategy.

“We was raised to go to war, that’s the code we knew
And when one of us get challenged, we expect to see it through.”

And then the person who wrote half the textbook for that doctrine fails its biggest exam.

“Cole is our reflection, that’s what really hurt us more
Kendrick pressed, Cole stepped back, never seen that before.”

That word, “reflection,” carries more weight than anything else on the track. Cole was the proof that discipline and pen skill could survive any pressure. When Cole walked away, Symba lost a version of himself that he’d been banking on for years. The most honest stretch of the song follows.

“It had me questioning what was all of the training for
Maybe standing down is standing up, ain’t think of that before.”

He’s admitting he never once considered retreat as an option, and that admission frightens him. The code he grew up under had no clause for surrender-as-wisdom. And the Marvin Gaye flip is literal. Marvin Gaye was killed by his own father. Symba is saying, in plain language, this art form will not be the thing that destroys me. “This Marvin Gaye won’t get smoked by his father, nigga.” He’s drawing a line in dirt. He was raised by hip-hop, he owes hip-hop, and he is refusing to die the way hip-hop’s children keep dying. Burned out, bitter, or muted into nothing.

The closing run, “I’m a troubled brother, but honestly I love all you niggas/Hip-hop, that’s our only motherfucking father figure,” doesn’t settle a single thing. He’s wounded by rap, he still claims rap, and he’s not pretending he has a fix. The door stays open to Cole. The disappointment stays on the table. The rules he was raised under sit next to the new and terrifying possibility that they were never complete. Symba holds love and disappointment in the same fist and lets you watch him tremble.

Does the song say something necessary? Yes. Every other response record in this cycle picked a winner or cashed a side-bet. Symba is the only one who paused long enough to ask whether the game itself raised him wrong. The writing is specific, the concept holds airtight, and the beat selection is cannier than it needed to be. Where the song stumbles is in the second verse’s middle stretch, where a few couplets lean on parallel phrasing hard enough to blunt some of the conversational momentum the rest of the track sustains. And the name-drop roll call in verse three risks reading as fan service if you aren’t tracking the argument underneath it. Those are scratches on a car that still runs clean.