He relies on cozy horn drips and unhurried pianos to bolster his brand of moody rumination without distracting from it. It’s a traditionalist sound that survives by its detail. Cole leans on lounge-jazz grooves and clattering low-end, occasionally venturing into orchestral grandiosity (‘Trouble’) and woozy RZA worship (Mo Money). Sure, spending excessively on jewelry is imprudent (Chaining Day) and hearing your idol detested your first single must be crushing (Let Nas Down), but if there’s no meaning to be parsed from these ideas beyond those one sentence summaries, why are they used as the groundwork for entire songs? When he isn’t indulging this swirling melodrama where women are two dimensional props for him to hang his emotions on, he’s reflecting on his rise to celebrity with narrow perception. When Cole isn’t glossing over the perils of infidelity, he’s trying to project sensitive jock pandering as genuine affection. ‘Power Trip’ proves Cole’s ability to craft warm, alluring radio rap, and tracks like the album’s interludes display his naturally deft flow, but both of these assets are played down to showcase his meandering narratives and paper-thin, formalist songwriting. It’s the same territory that Kanye traversed on The College Dropout, navigated with none of that album’s humor, panache, or panorama. The rest of Born Sinner belabors the points that the first to songs introduce: Cole’s career and Cole’s troubled relations with women.
Andre 3000 and J Cole don’t inhabit the same creative universe, so to view ‘Land of The Snakes’ as Cole’s take on ‘The Art of Storytelling’ is to do the latter a disservice. Juxtaposing this with Andre 3000’s brutally vivid tale of Sasha Thumper, a three dimensional character with suffocated dreams, abusive partners, and an ultimately fatal addiction feels almost like a critical cop-out. “Land Of The Snakes” uses the beat from Outkast’s brilliant “The Art Of Storytelling” ( ) to tell a story of a girl who Cole “boned in his dorm room” but “never called back”, reaching its climax when the nameless girl calls Mr. The song also contains the lyrical tangle: “My verbal AK slay faggots/And I don’t mean no disrespect whenever I say faggot/Okay faggot?/Don’t be so sensitive/If you want to get fucked in the ass/That’s between you and whoever else’s dick it is/Pause, maybe that line was too far/Just a little joke to show how homophobic you are.” And it doesn’t get much easier from there. As with most of the records here, it’s delivered with an overbearing conviction that comes off as histrionic given the hollow subject matter. The album’s opener ‘Villuminati’ tells the mundane story of his ascension from unknown artist to Roc-Nation signee while veering off into bitterness (“Beyonce told me that she wanna cop the blue Bugatti/That shit is worth more than I’m worth, I think she knew it probably”) and clarification about his affiliation with the Illuminati. J Cole’s point of view begins and ends with the mirror. Cole has proven himself a capable producer and a thoughtful emcee, and while Born Sinner makes a strong enough case for the former description, his choice to put writing at the album’s forefront highlights an insularity that will likely prevent him from ever entering the ranks of the artists he so reveres.
It’s a record that is both aggravated and enervated by the self-imposed pressure to produce a “classic”, delivered from a worldview that fuses servility with self-importance. His sophomore album, Born Sinner, pilfers beats from A Tribe Called Quest and Outkast and ceaselessly references Nas, Biggie, Tupac, and Cole’s label boss Jay-Z. J Cole is a rapper trapped in the shadows of his idols. Although none of these records have superseded Chance The Rapper’s miraculous Acid Rap as my favorite release of 2012, the abundance of great tracks released in the past month (Not you, Jay-Z) has given me new hope for this year’s hip-hop offerings, which were looking rather thin back in May.
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Over the next few days, I’ll be posting my belated thoughts on some of the major hip-hop releases of June in 700 words or less, starting with J Cole’s Born Sinner and moving on to Mac Miller’s Watching Movies With The Sound Off, Wale’s The Gifted, Freddie Gibbs’ ESGN, Migos Y.R.N., and Killer Mike and El-P’s Run The Jewels.
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