J. Cole: Rap's Perpetual Student
When I first joined Twitter a couple months back, I mostly followed other music journalists. Having spent the last year-and-change honing my skills in telling stories around music, I wanted to see what people with that same skillset were getting up to in the Twitterverse. In short order, I came to understand what the world was going on about when they talked about their “Twitter bubble”. These music writers - who are sometimes too plugged in to the world of music to see the forest for the trees - would go on and on about specific albums/artists/songs that seemed to have no bearing on the people I talked to out in the real world. More than that, this Twitterverse would often double down on musical takes that would sometimes seem out of the blue to casual music listeners.
The most recent example of this is when my Twitter feed woke up one morning and said: “Ugh, here comes J. Cole again.”
A few weeks ago, J. Cole released his sixth studio album, The Off-Season. The best way to describe the reaction my little Twitter bubble had: exasperation. There was a weariness to even some of the positive takes on this album, a sense that even if the work of listening to it was worth it, it was still work.
To live exclusively in this Twitter bubble means to find J. Cole’s music cumbersome and proselytizing. Every tweet or article I read about the album lamented the fact that he seemed unable to stop lecturing over beats and start making music. And yet for most people, to live outside of this bubble means to understand that J. Cole is one of the most beloved hip-hop lyricists of the past decade.
Rap Caviar recently went viral for tweeting an image of (L to R) Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole as their “Mount Rushmore of hip-hop”, asking followers to fill in the 4th face.
Figuring out what to make of these two contrasting portraits of J. Cole requires a bit more context.
There’s a word that has followed J. Cole around since early on in his career: “student”. This is something you hear a lot in hip-hop, this idea of being “a student of the game”. In theory, it means someone who is literate in hip-hop history, and aspires for excellence as defined by the rap legends that came before them. In practice, it’s a term deployed by hip-hop traditionalists as a way to describe someone who fits their particular (and sometimes outdated) image of a “good MC”. With songs like “Lights Please” and “Who Dat”, Cole made a buzz for himself early on as a “student of the game”, one who could potentially bring its lessons to the mainstream. This is how people talked about not only him, but also his music. His work was spoken about in terms of its studiedness, as though it wasn’t actual rap music, but rather a pedagogical exemplar of rap music. Despite how exciting J. Cole was, there was something deeply unexciting about the way he was being discussed.
All this discussion culminated in 2014 when he released his third studio album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive.
2014 Forest Hills Drive is considered by many to be a classic of 2010’s hip-hop. Produced almost entirely by Cole himself, and becoming a meme for going “platinum with no features”, the album was an unlikely blockbuster. It debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200, earned him a Billboard Music Award and a Grammy nomination, and has since gone triple platinum. It received wide-spread acclaim for J. Cole’s ability to fit compelling storytelling, skillful wordsmithing, bold production, and radio-friendly hits all into one cohesive project.
It seemed as though the student had become the master. And that’s when the trouble started; as it turns out, J. Cole is much better at being a student.
To be sure, the idea that J. Cole’s lyrics are overly-didactic and self-congratulatory was already a part of the conversation around him. Many had begun to feel like his albums were towering soapboxes decorated to look like art. However, this didn’t become a mainstream sentiment until Cole released his fifth studio album, KOD.
According to J. Cole, KOD is an acronym with three meanings: Kids On Drugs, King Overdosed, and Kill Our Demons. (That sound you just heard was a groan involuntarily escaping your body like an exorcism.) The album is mostly an exploration of the role addiction plays in today’s culture; addiction to drugs, but also money, women, and success. Many of the album’s lyrics took aim at a new breed of rappers who, at least in Cole’s eyes, were abusing hip-hop culture by glorifying these addictions. With KOD, Cole seemed to say, “I’m done being a student, now I want to teach.” However, he sounds less like a college professor on this album and more like a substitute high school teacher who thinks he’s going to get through to his students by sitting on a backwards chair. Pitchfork gave the album a 6.3/10 (a fairly average Pitchfork rating for a J. Cole album), saying “With his fifth album, the North Carolina rapper aims for righteousness but often ends up sounding self-righteous instead.”
Yet, while statements like these had become mainstream, that is not to say that they were popular. KOD debuted on the top of Billboard’s Hot 200, and became his third album in a row to go “platinum with no features”. It was also streamed on Apple Music 64.5 million times, breaking a record previously held by Drake. Even with an album that produced fewer noteworthy hits than his earlier work, J. Cole continued to be a part of the “greatest of our generation” conversation, with people of all ages praising his work in redefining conscious rap.
This left many professional critics of J. Cole in a quandary: how does one respect the technical prowess of one of hip-hop’s most beloved MC’s, while still asking him to just tone it down a bit? It was a question many were excited to put to bed. That is, until three weeks ago.
J. Cole released The Off-Season in a unique position. I can’t think of another rapper who has been as traditional, as successful, and as critically polarizing as he has been. Those three things don’t often come all in one package. Under these conditions, he seems to be out to prove something with this new album; not to his detractors, but to himself.
In a promotional mini-documentary, J. Cole - whose basketball career recently ended as soon as it began - explains the album’s title: the project is meant to present a full-circle moment, continuing the sportsman mentality he had on his debut mixtape, The Warm Up: put in the work, do your drills, the grind doesn’t stop just because the season’s over. Even though Cole has accomplished all that a hip-hop artist could hope to, he still hasn’t let go of this approach. The Off-Season could have been a victory lap, but instead it’s like a workout session taking place right after the championship.
The most noteworthy thing about The Off-Season is its guest features. This is the first J. Cole project to feature other rappers since his 2013 sophomore album, Born Sinner. What’s more is that, rather than recruit people firmly in his lane, like Kendrick Lamar, Cole opens up his world to people who, if you didn’t know better, you would swear he was condescending to on KOD. His collaboration with Lil’ Baby is especially effective.
He isn’t so much giving in to the younger generation as he is allowing them to do what they do but on his terms, perhaps playing the bad cop parent to Drake’s good cop parent.
If J. Cole is trying to respond to his detractors with this album (and I don’t believe he is), it isn’t by negating their critiques, but by deflecting them, by being so agile as to float above them. The rapping on The Off-Season is as astonishing as ever. He may no longer be rap’s undergrad, but he clearly hasn’t stopped studying. In every bar, word, and annunciation, you can hear his decade’s worth of work. For some critics, this is exactly the problem; they feel he’d be better served by showing the results rather than the work that went into them. But for Cole, this isn’t just a stylistic choice, it’s a moral one. He simply refuses to flex without acknowledging the grind that came before the success, lest he portray the same greed and hubris he spoke out against in KOD. The end result is an album that serves as a delightfully effective aspirational tool, even if it isn’t particularly artful. Listening to The Off-Season is like getting to watch your favorite basketball player work out: it’s impressive, exciting, and it makes you appreciate them even more, but at the end of the day, you’d still rather watch them hoop.
This, I believe, is the source of the frustration that pervades my Twitter bubble. By making an album about work, J. Cole has yet again made an album that feels like work. Music is already a job for so many of the people I follow on Twitter, and it seems as though Cole is just there to make them work even harder without offering any notable reward. Unfortunately for them, I think I know exactly what Cole’s response to this complaint would be:
“You’re welcome.”
