Three sixes! And then…
[Video]
[4.83]Nortey Dowuona: Ambition is a perfect thing to have for a rapper. The problem with ambition is that when it’s aimed merely at recreating the ambitious steps of your music heroes, it’s not acceptable for anyone who wants something more bold, exciting and original. Ambition thus becomes a curdled mushroom soup created directly for the average, bored and lazy, left for anyone who is struggling to eat anything at all. But truly, ambition is punished if too original; most will shun you, treat you with contempt or hatred; then seal away all your ambitious strides in a museum for the unambitious and selfish. Or you will be valorized, revered and praised long beyond the truly special time of musical innovation, due to that love becoming largely adopted by the world. Ambition is the fuel for so many artists, who decide to step into the limelight and into worldly renown, and often it will never come, and you will accept it, or it comes, and you are destroyed completely. The frustrating cudgel of unmet ambitions will be rapped against both your knuckles and spine, the joy of surpassed ambitions will strangle you. And ultimately, you will never know which it was until your mind is scrambling to make up a facsimile of comfort to persuade you into accepting the crumbling of your body and thus consciousness. Anyone who looks at a cat like J. Cole is looking at either someone who must be cudgeled out of existence, or suffocated into delusions of heaven. I encourage my fellow writers to ask: which one? Or more importantly, what is the ambition in recreating the past, and how long till what we praise as cutting edge succumbs to this ambition?
[6]
Alfred Soto: Not until the second verse does Cole sound awake on his own track, and for the most part the T-Minus production complements his staccato evocations of life in Fayetteville when you’re a young J.Cole. Some good lines too (“Adjacent to the hood just like the pointer is to the thumb”). He thinks he recorded a masterpiece; a decade ago his cult would have acclaimed it as one.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Some good lines, until you get to the “rap bitches” one. C’mon, Cole.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I appreciate his commitment to tedium — here, he whispers, raps, declaims, yells, and sings, all with the same listless affect and unwillingness to use any lyrical tactics aside from the tired tools he’s been rapping with since the early 2010s.
[3]
Andrew Karpan: The slow perseverance of the idea of J. Cole is a modern parable of the resilience of niche markets, of speaking in a direct way to audiences that stick around; it’s a bit boring, however, when he insists, insistently, on repeatedly talking about that too.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: The concept of a J. Cole Banger is a fallacy: Even when he’s rapping about capacious bags and interpolating The Last Mr. Biggs, he can’t resist lecturing younger rappers about staying in school and investing in real estate. Which is all fine and good, but maybe just start a wealth management Substack instead?
[4]